Constantine Pyatikrestovsky

Holy Hieromartyr Constantine Pyatikrestovsky, an archpriest, was born on 31 May 1877 in Moscow, in the family of the deacon Michael Pyatikrestovsky. He studied at the theological school, and in 1897 graduated from the Moscow theological seminary in the second category and was appointed teacher at the two-⁠class parish school of Saint George. In 1899 he married Lyudmila, daughter of the priest Sergius Mitropolsky of the church of Saint Nicholas in Moscow, and they had four sons. In the same year he was ordained priest at the church of the holy Archangel Michael in the village of Korobcheevo, Kolomna district. After two and a half years he fell seriously ill and in 1902 retired from active ministry.

In 1903 he was appointed priest of the church of Saint Nicholas in the village of Letovo, Podolsk district, where he served ten years. In 1913 he became rector of the church of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple in Konyushennaya sloboda near Dmitrov. After the revolution the Renovationist schism arose, but Father Constantine remained, in every trial, faithful to Orthodoxy, and the Renovationists counted him in their reports among the firmest Tikhonites of the Dmitrov district. In 1926 he was awarded the pectoral cross, and in 1932 he was raised to the rank of archpriest.

He was arrested on 26 November 1937 and held in the Taganka prison in Moscow. On 28 November the investigator questioned him. Father Constantine said that he had held no hostile views toward the Communists and did not consider himself guilty of anti-⁠Soviet agitation, but admitted having said that the Bolsheviks should understand that the priests were not the problem and that no harm to the authorities would come from priests; that in private talks he said faith in God would not cease with the arrest of priests and the closing of churches, being immortal; and that the Bolsheviks were fighting religion not ideologically but by force and arrests, and that nothing would be improved that way.

On 5 December 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years of imprisonment. A witness later told how all the prisoners were gathered, shorn, shaved and stripped of their cassocks in mockery. Father Constantine was sent to the Mariinsk camps. On arriving he wrote to his wife: he sent greetings to the children and grandchildren, gave the address for letters and spoke of his signature needed for the sale of the house. His wife answered him but received no reply, and on 7 April 1938 his son Panteleimon wrote, asking why he no longer wrote, whether he was ill and what he needed. On the back of this letter another prisoner wrote to the priest's wife: she should not be frightened, her husband had died, she should write no more and not look for him, for he had reposed by the mercy of God.

The archpriest Constantine Pyatikrestovsky died in the hospital of the Mariinsk camp on 6 March 1938 and was buried in an unknown grave. He is commemorated on 6 March, the day of his death, on 7 February, with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, on 29 August, with the Synaxis of the Saints of Kuzbass, and on 5 September, with the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.