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St. John was martyred brutally in the night of [[October 12]], 1934, at the archbishop's residence at Kish Lake (Latvian: Ķīšezers) outside Riga's city center. Although his assassins were never apprehended, they have widely been assumed to be agents of the Bolshevik regime in neighboring Soviet Russia, whose persecutions of the Orthodox Church the saint had already suffered earlier during a turbulent period of service as Archbishop of Penza and Saransk (1918-1921). Earlier still, he served as auxiliary Bishop of Minsk (1911-1912) and Bishop of Priazovye (1913-1917).
In 1921, the year St. John returned to Latvia, St. [[Tikhon of Moscow]], then Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, granted independence to the Latvian Orthodox Church. Therefore St. John became the first Latvian [[archbishop]]. Jurisdictional difficulties followed his martyrdom, lasting from 1936 to 1940, and the suffering of the Latvian Orthodox Church increased again during Latvia's Soviet occupation, which lasted from the Second World War until 1991. In 1992, the Latvian Orthodox Church became semi-autonomous, with a high degree of independence but lacking autocephaly. Thus, the contemporary pastoral successor to St. John of Riga bears the title [[Metropolitan]]. One of St. John's early successors in Riga was His Eminence the Most Reverend John (Garklavs) of Chicago, who became Bishop of Riga and All Latvia in 1943 before fleeing the violence of war with his family one year later; he later served as Bishop of Detroit and Cleveland (1949-1955) and Archbishop of Chicago (1957-1978) in the American Metropolia (now the Orthodox Church in America).
The day of the saintSt. John's martyrdom is his[[ feast day]], October 12. St. John's His canonization occurred locally in 2001, having been recognized already many years before by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.
Despite the terrible nature of the saint's martyrdom, during which he suffered both bullet wounds and burning, St. John's body was found intact in 2003.
