Christopher Varfolomeyev

Holy Hieromartyr Christopher Varfolomeyev was a priest of the Russian Church. He was born on 27 October 1883 in the village of Korpiselka, Salmi district, Vyborg province, and died on 8 September 1938 at Komsomolsk-⁠on-⁠Amur. He was glorified in 2017 among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, for veneration throughout the Church. His commemoration is on 19 September by the new calendar.

He was born into the family of a priest. He graduated from the clerical school in Saint Petersburg (1897), the Saint Petersburg Seminary (1903) and the law faculty of Saint Petersburg University, with a first-⁠class diploma (1909). He worked in the chancery of the Governor-⁠General of Finland, then as translator for the Finnish Gazette and in the economic department of the Finnish Senate, where he became a legal adviser. In 1910 he married Alexandra Ivanovna Aninskaya, the daughter of a priest, and they had two daughters, Vera and Maria. He lived at Helsingfors, then moved with his family to Kexholm in Vyborg province. He received the Order of Saint Anne, third class.

In 1917 he was a member of two congresses of the clergy and laity of the Finnish diocese at the Valaam Monastery, took part in the inspection of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, and was elected as a layman by the Finnish diocese to the Local Council, in which he was a member of the second, third, fourth and sixth sections and took part in the first session; after the Christmas recess he could not return to Moscow, because the border was closed. From 1918 he was senior psalmist at the Nativity of the Mother of God Cathedral in Kexholm. From 1919 he was a clerk in the fourth district of the Murmansk railway.

From 1921 he was priest at the dependency of the Tvorozhkovo Holy Trinity convent in Leningrad, and rector of the church of Saint Peter, metropolitan of Moscow. He lived beside the church. In 1925 he visited his family who had remained in Finland. From 1930 he served at the cathedral of Venerable Sergius of Radonezh, and from 1932 he was archpriest at the Transfiguration Cathedral in Leningrad.

In 1934 he was arrested and refused to give testimony. As a member of a Finnish counter-⁠revolutionary fascist church organization, under articles 58-10 and 58-11, he was sentenced to five years in a camp. He died of sepsis in the hospital of Vostoklag.