Outside of a Risk board, you don't often find references to Irkutsk. You can see it on the image at right, south of Yakutsk, east of Siberia, north of Mongolia, and west of Kamchatka. Pretty much, that tells you everything you need to know about the place -- remember that when the Mongols went conquering, they traveled south and west. People sent exiles east to Siberia -- any one sent further east must have surely been condemned to oblivion.One such exile was a Greek Catholic priest named Ivan Ziatyk. He worked in Poland and then the Ukraine, rising to the rank of Vicar General as all his superiors were exiled or imprisoned. The communist regime arrested him in 1950 and exiled him to Irkutsk, where he was tortured and beaten until his death in 1952.
He is (at present) beatified but not canonized. If you have any miracles that could be attributed to him, be sure to tell the Vatican so they can finish up the paperwork and make him a full saint.
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