Basil Triumfov

Holy Hieromartyr Basil Triumfov, a priest, by his full name Basil Alexandrovich Triumfov, was born in 1848. In 1870 he finished the Pskov seminary and was ordained priest for the church of the Protection of the Mother of God in the village of Bezhanitsy, Novorzhev district, Pskov province. The parish then numbered almost thirty villages, with more than seven thousand Orthodox. The church had been built in 1791 by the landowners Filosofov, who had two estates at Bezhanitsy.

In 1894 Father Basil founded in his parish the first Temperance Society in Pskov province, with a tea-⁠room built by the local landowners, where every Sunday he held conversations on religious and moral themes. Beside the tea-⁠room he set up a library of religious and agricultural books. In 1905 he began to teach religion at the parish school and soon was put in charge of it. He was a member of the district section of the diocesan school council and of the deanery and trusteeship councils. For his faultless and diligent service he was raised in 1911 to archpriest.

In 1919, in the time of the persecution of the Church, Archpriest Basil Triumfov was arrested. On 13 February 1919 he was sentenced to death and shot. He is commemorated on 26 February, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 11 July (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Pskov, all in the new style.