Alexis Voroshin of Yelnat

Blessed Alexis Voroshin of Yelnat, fool for Christ, was born in 1886 in the village of Kaurchikha, in the Yuryevets district of the Kostroma province, in the family of pious peasants Ivan and Evdokia Voroshin. He died in the prison at Kineshma in 1937, after torture. His relics now rest in the Holy Presentation Convent in Ivanovo. The Russian Church honours him among the New Martyrs and Confessors.

Beginnings

Those places are known for the labours of Blessed Simeon of Yuryevets, in the sixteenth century, and Alexis's path resembled his. His village lay between the spring of Blessed Simeon and the village of Yelnat, where his father was the warden of the church of Saint Nicholas. When the time came to marry, he had chosen a bride, but gave her up, because she would not heed his plea not to go to the village youth gatherings, which went beyond the bounds of piety. He felt that the whole order of Russian life was shaking and, at the outbreak of the war, judged that great calamity was coming. He went to the Krivoezersk Hermitage, on the left bank of the Volga, directly opposite Yuryevets, was received as a novice and stayed there a year, then returned home and made a cell in the garden, where he prayed, or at the spring of Blessed Simeon.

Foolishness for Christ

After March 1917 he was chosen chairman of the village council, but did not change his habits; he prayed much, went to the services and settled village business without leaving the church. After a year, when a chairman appointed from the town arrived, he left the office and withdrew to his cell, given to fasting and prayer, for nine years. In 1928 he took up the labour of foolishness for Christ: he lived wherever he happened to be, in rags, and no one knew where he slept. His actions were signs: he measured the fields with a stick in the midst of the work, and a year later the Soviet official appeared; he went naked to visit the merchants, and soon all their property was taken; he measured houses and named senseless figures, and the householder was later arrested and received exactly that many years; he put on good clothes given to him, then left them on the snow, and the hosts were driven out in winter in their shirts. The people mostly treated him with mockery, but later they remembered. He cared nothing for clothes and wore the same long kaftan.

In the church at Yelnat, during a service, he walked in with a cap on his head and a cigarette in his mouth, strolling with his hands behind his back; before long the authorities ordered the church closed. The warden Pavel Ivanovich Baidin refused to hand the keys to the godless, was arrested at Kineshma and died in prison, of old age and the investigation; the church was closed and turned into a club. The blessed one was arrested several times and sent to the psychiatric hospital at Kostroma, but each time the doctors found him healthy. He foretold years of war, the closing of almost all churches, then the reopening of some and a new wave of persecution around 1960. He also foretold the place and manner of his death: fifteen years before he asked his sister Anna to prepare bast shoes for him, and in those shoes he was laid in the coffin. A year before his death he asked his nephew Nicholas whether he would come to the funeral.

Martyrdom

In May 1937, feeling that this time he would not come out of prison, he went home to his relatives, took his few things out of his sack and arranged to whom to give them, sang a prison song, bowed to the ground to the house, and said: "I will repay you for everything." He then went to Parfenovo, where he was arrested and taken to the Kineshma prison, full of priests, monks, church wardens, believing women who would not give their children to the collective farm, children who gathered ears of grain, but also thieves and murderers. He was put among the criminals, where he prayed day and night and gave away almost all his food. Since there was nothing to accuse him of, the investigators tortured him, standing him barefoot on a red-⁠hot stove. When the head of the prison asked why he was jailed, he answered gently: "It is God's will", and added: "Why do you talk with me, when there is misfortune in your house?" The head found his wife hanged and from then on sought an occasion to release him. But after little more than a month in the investigation cell, exhausted by torture, the blessed one entered the prison hospital and died there.

His body was given to relatives on the thirteenth day and buried at a cemetery in Kineshma. On 12 (25) September 1985 his remains were moved to the church in the village of Zharki, and today his relics rest in the Holy Presentation Convent in Ivanovo. He is commemorated on 25 September and 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 20 June, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Ivanovo Metropolis.