Alexis Velikoselsky

Holy Hieromartyr Alexis Velikoselsky, a priest, was born in 1865 in a family of servants of the Church and was shot at Kostroma on 17 (30) August 1918, on an unjust charge of collaboration with the White Guard. He was glorified by the Council of Bishops of 13 to 16 August 2000, and the Holy Synod's decision to number him among the New Martyrs is of 26 December 2001.

He finished the seminary at Yaroslavl in 1888 and served as psalm-⁠reader, teacher and teacher of religion at the parish school beside the church of the Origin of the Venerable Trees of the Holy Cross in the village of Krasnoe on the Sheksna, in the Mologa district, a village later covered by the waters of the Rybinsk reservoir. He married Zinaida Arsenievna, born in 1870, and on 9 June 1891 was ordained priest for the church of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God in the village of Nikolskoe-⁠na-⁠Tropye, in the Rybinsk district, where he was also head and teacher of a literacy school. In April 1903 he was moved, at his request, to the Saviour church in the village of Ivashevo, in the Rostov district, where he taught religion and church singing in the schools. On 12 November 1912 Archbishop Tikhon Belavin of Yaroslavl and Rostov, the future patriarch, moved him to the church of the Smolensk Icon in the village of Diyevo-⁠Gorodishche, in the Yaroslavl district, and then appointed him rector of the church of the Holy Trinity in the same village.

In 1918, at the time of the Yaroslavl uprising, a detachment of White guards occupied the village of Diyevo-⁠Gorodishche, which lies on the border of the Yaroslavl and Kostroma provinces. On 10 June the Reds took the village by storm and arrested about a hundred villagers, among them Father Alexis, rector of the Trinity church, on whose bell tower a machine gun was found. The Bolsheviks took the priest for a White guardsman and shot him at Kostroma on 30 August 1918. The news of the execution reached the Commission on Persecutions of the Council of 1917 to 1918 from members of the Yaroslavl diocesan council. He is commemorated on 30 August, on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kostroma on 5 February, and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl on 5 June.