Alexander Miropolsky

Saint Hieromartyr Alexander Miropolsky (1847 to 1918) was an archpriest and missionary among the baptized Tatars and was shot by Red Guards in the night of 23 June 1918. He is commemorated on 6 July, on 7 February with the synaxis of the new martyrs, on 10 October with the saints of the Chelyabinsk metropolis, and on 17 October with the saints of Kazan. He was buried at the Dormition church of the Kasli plant.

Beginnings

He was born in 1847 into the family of the deacon Stepan Gurievich Miropolsky, of the church of the Protection in the village of Belaya Gora, Chistopol district, Kazan province. The teachers at the church school told him that he had exceptional gifts for languages, advised him to enter the university and taught him French and German zealously. He then entered the Kazan seminary and resolved to become a priest. In 1868 he finished the seminary. Going home, his brother, a priest in the village of Novotroitskoe, invited him to visit; on the way they stopped at the dean's, who was a widower, and found there his sister Evgenia. The brother asked: "Shall we ask for the dean's sister for you?" "As if a mist covered my head," he recalled later, "and I answered without knowing: as you wish." Evgenia's father was a priest in the village of Apazovo, whose parish was made up mostly of baptized Tatars. With his consent Alexander went to Archbishop Anthony (Amfiteatrov) of Kazan to ask for a priest's place and, receiving it, married and was ordained priest in the village of Alexandrovskoe.

Mission among the baptized Tatars

In 1871 his father-⁠in-⁠law fell gravely ill and asked him to take over his place. Father Alexander did not want to go to a village with many Muslims, where many baptized Tatars had gone back to Islam, but could not refuse the father-⁠in-⁠law he sincerely loved; he wrote the petition with many reservations, hoping it would be refused. The father-⁠in-⁠law, reading the petition, knelt before the icon of the Saviour and prayed with such faith that Father Alexander understood that the Lord would hear the prayer. Indeed he was soon moved to the church of the Protection at Apazovo, where he served most of his life. Although he knew Tatar perfectly, the baptized Tatars received him with displeasure, because just then a movement had begun for appointing Tatar priests to parishes, and he was Russian. At first he was appointed exhorter of the lapsed, then district missionary, and raised to the rank of archpriest. In 1881 he was widowed, with two small daughters, and wished to settle them and become a monk, but Saint John of Kronstadt appeared to him in a dream and advised him to take an orphan girl into his house and go on serving in the same village; so he did, and the girl became a great help to him. In 1881 more than two hundred souls lapsed into Islam; he wished to leave, but went to church, prayed and forgot to write the petition. In 1883 all the lapsed returned to Orthodoxy. He then noticed that the religion textbooks were composed emptily and darkly and wrote a report; he also found that the missionary courses at the academy did more harm than good, because they explained Muhammad's teaching at length without setting it against the Christian, and he wrote of this too to the archbishop.

In 1900 he was appointed to the cathedral of the Holy Trinity at Mamadysh, where in 1905, because of the unrest, he had troubles: the town's intelligentsia considered him out of date, found support among the clergy too, and the situation became impossible for him. He asked to be moved to his old place, but Archbishop Demetrius (Sambikin) proposed that he enter, without entrance examination, as a man of pensionable age, the Kazan Theological Academy, where he was admitted in 1906. He could attend all the lectures and use the library, but, having sat no examination, could not write papers, take exams or pass from one year to the next. He chose the missionary section. In four years he missed no lecture, came first and left last and spent all his free time in the library; he was also the most zealous worshipper and server at the academy church. With the younger ones, who could have been his grandsons, he was gentle: "Ah, young people, you want to go out for a walk... but life does not wait; in life you will have to be orderly, and it would be good to get used to it now." Finishing the academy, he chose to go to the Yekaterinburg diocese, where many Muslims lived, and in 1911 he served at the Dormition church of the Kasli plant; on 22 December 1912 he was appointed diocesan missionary. He wrote: "In all my 44 years of service, all my moves were guided by God's providence, which directed my service to the mission among other peoples."

Martyrdom

The septuagenarian was arrested first at the end of 1917 for distributing religious and moral books in Tatar; he was freed by the soviet of workers' deputies only after the Tatars certified that there was nothing counter-⁠revolutionary in the books. The second time he was arrested by Red Guards on 22 June 1918 and in the night of 23 June shot. The executioners, not satisfied with the shooting, dealt him several blows so strong that his face was disfigured; in his side was a terrible wound, one leg broken and the sole pierced, and at last, with hands bound, he was thrown into a pit. The body of the martyr pastor was found after the Red Guards left the locality. On 7 July 1918 the funeral service of Archpriest Alexander Miropolsky, the priests Peter Belyaev and Peter Smorodintsev and twenty-⁠seven laymen was held at the Dormition church of the Kasli plant; they were buried near the church.