Alexander Orlov

Holy Confessor Alexander Orlov was a priest of the Russian Church. He was born in 1878 in the village of Makkoveevo, Kasimov district, Ryazan province, and died on 27 April 1941. He was numbered among the saints as a confessor by the Holy Synod of the Russian Church on 27 December 2000. His commemoration is on 14 April by the old calendar (27 April by the new).

He was born into the family of Vasily Evdokimovich Orlov, a teacher at the parish church school and later a deacon. He finished the parish church school and the clerical school. In 1913 he received the rank of deacon and began to serve at the church of the Protection in the village of Makkoveevo. At thirty-⁠five he married Ekaterina Vasilievna Kivotova. In 1928 he was ordained priest by Archbishop Juvenal of Ryazan and Shatsk and appointed to the church of the Holy Great Martyr Paraskeva in the village of Sheyanka (now Sheenki). He was the confessor of the blessed Matrona of Anemnyasevo.

On 30 June 1935 he was arrested together with many clergy of the Kasimov district, in the case of the priests Pravdolyubov and the blessed Matrona Belyakova. At all the interrogations he defended his spiritual daughter. On 2 August of the same year he was sentenced to five years in a labour camp. He served the sentence on Solovki (1935 to 1937) and at the Sosnovets camp point of Medvezhyegorsklag, in Karelia (1937 to 1940). In the summer of 1940, after his release, he returned to the Kasimov district. In imprisonment he broke his health and died soon after his return, on 27 April 1941.

The troparion of the holy confessor Alexander Orlov (tone 4) says that, unafraid of sufferings in this temporal life, he turned his soul toward Christ, received the priestly ministry from the Lord and kept faith with him unto death, and asks him not to forget his church and his flock. The kontakion (tone 6) speaks of the apostolic words that he received in his heart, to live and die for the Lord, of prison, bonds and heavy affliction, then of the death that he bore manfully for Christ, having taught his children to sing with joy: For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.