Among the approximately 38 000 participants in the January Uprising sent to exile or forced settlement in Russia, there were 622 priests and monks.

The reason for the priests' exile was not only their active participation in the uprising (serving as chaplains to the insurgent troops), but also their spiritual service to the insurgents, taking the oath, caring for the wounded, attending the funerals of the fallen and providing material aid to the 'rebels'. The Russian authorities also treated as political offences the preaching of patriotic sermons or the reading of the act of the National Government on the enfranchisement of peasants during church services.

Repressed priests were initially sent to various parts of north-eastern Russia. The Russian authorities regarded priests and monks as a particularly dangerous category of Polish political prisoners, as evidenced by the fact that they were not covered by the tsarist amnesty of April 1866. This attitude of the authorities gave rise to the idea of isolating priests from other convicts and concentrating them in one place. This idea was put forward by the Governor General of Eastern Siberia, Mikhail Korsakov, in November 1865.

Tunka was chosen as the place to settle the priests - a Buryatian village, located in the valley of the Sayan Mountains, far from communication routes; the climate here was hostile and unhealthy.

The first 6 priests were brought here on 13.01.1866, then gradually more were brought, and in 1870 there were 143 priests.

A total of 164 priests passed through Tunka. A detachment of 200 Cossacks was assigned to guard the priests.

Above all, the clergy were forbidden to move away from their place of residence. The attitude of the local population towards the deportees was initially unfriendly, but changed over time to correct. A serious problem for the deportees was the lack of health care.

In 1869, the Russian authorities allowed individual clergymen to resettle in the European part of Russia. The first major group of clergymen left Tunka in August 1873, and more clergymen were later released.

In 1880 there were 9 priests in Tunka and in 1888 1 priest, who moved to Irkutsk in the same year.

Priests who died in exile in Tunka were buried next to the Orthodox cemetery, located about 5 km from Tunka, on the mountainous left bank of the Irkut River. The Polish cemetery was surrounded by an iron fence, erected with contributions from the deportees; a gate was also built. Sixteen deceased priests were buried in this cemetery.

After the Polish exiles left Tunka in the 1890s, the Polish priests' cemetery had no one to look after it, so it gradually started to deteriorate. Nevertheless, it has survived to the present day. The graves are concentrated in one place, in a circle 12-15 m in diameter, in the middle of which stands a wooden cross erected at the beginning of the 21st century by Polish activists.