Alexis Knyazhesky

Holy Hieromartyr Alexis Knyazhesky, a priest, was born on 9 September 1884 in the village of Urey in the Krasnoslobodsk district of the Penza province, in the family of the peasant Ilya Knyazhesky. He was shot on 17 February 1938 at Butovo, near Moscow.

In 1909 he finished the seminary at Nizhny Novgorod, was ordained priest and served at the church of the village of Orekhovo in the Arzamas district. In 1929 he was accused, for his church zeal, of breaking the rules on the separation of Church and state, and was sentenced to a fine of three hundred rubles. In 1930, for non-⁠payment of taxes, his property was confiscated and he was exiled for three years from the Nizhny Novgorod region.

In 1931 he settled in the village of Veliky Dvor in the Taldom district of the Moscow region and served at the village church, showing there too his zeal for God and the Church. Witnesses called in 1938 said that from his arrival he had urged people steadily toward faith and that the number of believers had grown several times. People from other villages began to come to church; weddings and baptisms became more frequent. On the day of the twenty-⁠fifth anniversary of the October Revolution, when a rally had been announced, more people went to church than to the rally. In the summer of 1937 he organised a two-⁠day religious feast during the harvest and said that keeping the feasts bears on the welfare of a person's life.

He was arrested on 26 January 1938 and imprisoned at Butyrka in Moscow. The next day the investigator asked whether he admitted guilt for counter-⁠revolutionary sermons; he answered that he did not. The same day the investigation was closed, and on 8 February the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. He was shot on 17 February 1938 and buried in the unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range. He is commemorated on 17 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, the Synaxis of the Moscow Saints and the Synaxis of the Saints of the Nizhny Novgorod Metropolis.