Carp Elb

Holy Hieromartyr Carp Elb was a priest at the Estonian parish in Saint Petersburg and was shot on 24 September 1937. He is numbered among the new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church.

The deacon and teacher

Carp Elb served first as a deacon at Pühtitsa, without theological education. The priest Paul Petrovich Kulbush (the future Holy Hieromartyr Platon, bishop of Reval), who was in charge of the Estonian parishes of the Saint Petersburg diocese and was very particular in choosing clergy, invited him to fill a vacant deacon's place, which shows his exceptional qualities. Although the capital had many trained clergy, the church authorities appointed him teacher of religion in two girls' primary schools in the Kolomna quarter, and in addition he taught religion at the Estonian parish school. From 1914 he was invited as teacher at the model orphanage of Baron A. A. Stieglitz, where some two hundred children of poor families studied. Thus he taught at the same time in four educational institutions, two of which, the orphanage and the Estonian school, without pay.

His teaching work was several times rewarded with distinctions: on 13 February 1902 he received the silver medal "For Zeal", on 6 May 1904 the blessing of the Holy Synod with a certificate, and in May 1911 he was put forward for the Order of Saint Anne, third class. From 25 February 1903 he was a member and secretary of the commission for the building of the church of Saint Isidore. Often he found himself directing the works himself, and when Father Paul was long absent, the deacon Carp was responsible for the raising of the church and the parish house.

The priest

In 1917 the Estonian parish in Petrograd was left without a rector: Father Paul, ordained bishop on 31 December, left for Estonia. On the day before, the parish assembly resolved to ask Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd to ordain the deacon Carp Elb a priest, remaining as the second priest. On 8 January he was ordained priest by the Holy Hieromartyr Benjamin. A new stage began, of pastoral work, which lasted nearly twenty years and ended in martyr's death. He became a pastor in 1918, when service in the Church promised neither advantage, nor honour, nor an ordered life, but a slow squeezing in the vice of the godless regime.

The parish of Saint Isidore was one of the few in the city that did not go over to the Renovationists. The priests of the Estonian church did not consider it right to move to the new calendar after the decree of Saint Patriarch Tikhon, yet Father Carp and Archpriest Alexander Paklar, the rector, never thought of leaving obedience to their ruling bishop. There was in them neither weakness nor cowardice. Like many others, they considered that the policy of Metropolitan Sergius, though a forced and humiliating concession to the godless authority, did not touch the purity of the dogmas of the Orthodox faith.

Arrest and martyrdom

In 1937 he was arrested on the false charge of counter-⁠revolutionary propaganda. The record of his interrogation can be considered a rare monument of confession of those times. The investigator charged that he had said of the Church in the USSR that Soviet power persecutes it, that he had called the authorities "a band of robbers", that he had spoken of the needs of workers and peasants, of Soviet aid to Spain, of the persecution of innocent people on the anniversary of Kirov's death and of the treason of Tukhachevsky. To every question he answered that he had not said so and did not admit guilt. It seems he sensed that if he agreed for a moment with the investigator, the latter would twist his words and put into his mouth what he had not said.

The first interrogation was also the last. On 24 September 1937 the death sentence of the NKVD troika of the Leningrad region was carried out against Archpriest Carp Elb. He is commemorated on 24 September, on 7 February (a movable day), in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 11 July (a movable day), in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Saint Petersburg Metropolis, and on 1 December, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Estonia, in new style.