Alexander Arkhangelsky

Saint Hieromartyr Alexander Arkhangelsky (1874 to 1930) was a priest and archpriest in the Voronezh diocese and was shot on 2 August 1930, near Voronezh, together with a group of clergy. He is commemorated on 2 August and 10 August with the saints of Tambov, on 7 February with the synaxis of the new martyrs, on 23 June with the saints of Ryazan, on 17 September with the saints of Voronezh, and on 23 September with the saints of Lipetsk.

He was born on 1 February 1874 in the village of Soshka, Lipetsk district, into the family of the psalm-⁠reader Nicholas Nikanorovich Arkhangelsky. In 1896 he finished the Tambov seminary and entered a church as psalm-⁠reader. Then he met Catherine, daughter of Protopresbyter Capiton Alekseev, who became his wife; Capiton's family was large and devout. When his wife fell gravely ill at Tambov, he took into his house, as a helper, a deaf orphan girl. One day, going with her to see his wife, they saw that the icon of the Mother of God of Kazan was being carried through the street. Alexander asked that the sick girl be allowed to carry the icon. After a prayer service for health, they went on, and as they crossed a bridge a storm broke. The girl crossed herself in fright, and Alexander, amazed, asked her whether she could hear; she answered that she heard well. It was a plain miracle and a token of God's mercy.

Pastor and protector of orphans

In 1904 he was ordained deacon at the church of Storozhevye Vyselki, in the Voronezh diocese, and two years later priest. He had seven children. When two peasants of the parish died, leaving two orphan children, Father Alexander took them into his full care without hesitation. The village was large, its main street stretched almost ten kilometres. At the great feasts crowds of pilgrims from the surrounding villages came to the church, and many stayed overnight at the priest's house, where straw was spread on the floor and there was room for all. His wife, though sickly, cared for everyone. Father Alexander never passed by another's misfortune indifferently: when, on the way to Usman, he saw a house in flames, he stopped the cart, ran and carried a three-⁠year-⁠old girl out of the fire, and gave her to the neighbours.

He was a man uninterested in politics. In 1917 he read to the people in church, without comment, the act of abdication of the emperor Nicholas II. When the Bolsheviks came to power they demanded his house for a school, then books and journals, then household furniture; he gave everything without resistance. The school lasted a short time: the teachers and pupils often fell ill and, linking this with the fact that the classes were held in a house taken from a priest, they demanded that it be closed.

The persecution

In 1918 the authorities tried to arrest him in order to kill him. Before the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God, he came home late, wet and tired, and heard the sound of horses' hooves stop at his house. He understood that they had come for him. He went out into the porch and, changing his voice, asked who was there; then he said to those in the house: "May the Lord save you all. I am leaving; may the Lord deliver me too from their hands," and went out through the window into the yard. The three who had come searched the whole house, and the women said the priest had gone to a service or to the mill. Father went to a parishioner, who advised him to go farther; he reached a neighbouring village, where a parishioner hid him in straw. The Bolsheviks searched and pricked the straw with bayonets but, by God's mercy, did not touch him. The next morning he walked to Usman, then to Voronezh, where he received an appointment to the church in Lipovka. He served there two and a half years, one year at Mechetka, then, until his arrest, at the Dormition church in Buturlinovka, where he was raised to archpriest and made dean.

Arrest and martyrdom

In 1929 the persecution of the Church grew harsher. On 8 April 1930 Father Alexander was arrested. At the interrogations he did not admit guilt. On the evening of 2 August the sentence was read to the accused. They were loaded into a truck to be taken to the neighbourhood of Voronezh and killed. That same evening, at ten o'clock, the archimandrite Tikhon (Krechkov) of the Alekseevsky monastery, the hieromonks George (Pozharov) and Cosmas (Vyaznikov), the priests John Steblin-⁠Kamensky, Sergius Gortinsky, Theodore Yakovlev, Alexander Arkhangelsky, George Nikitin and the laymen Euthymius Grebenshchikov and Peter Vyaznikov were shot.