Demetrius Rozanov

Holy Hieromartyr Demetrius Rozanov, a priest, was born on 10 October 1889 in the village of Bardino, in the Kolomna district of the Moscow province, in the family of the psalm-⁠reader Pavel Rozanov, and died in the Bamlag camp on 31 March 1938. He is commemorated on 31 March, on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 13 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Birobidzhan Diocese, and on 5 September, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.

After graduating in 1907 from the clerical school in Kolomna he married Elizabeth Pavlovna Kedrova and was appointed psalm-⁠reader at the church of the Archangel Michael in the village of Pochinki. After the Bolshevik coup and the beginning of the civil war, in 1918 he was mobilised into the rear militia of the Red Army, where he served until 1921. On 21 November 1921 he was ordained deacon at the church of the Holy Archangel Michael in Pochinki, and on 8 May 1922 priest at the same church. At that time one of the forms of struggle of the atheist authorities against the Church was the demand for payment of arbitrarily set sums, in the form of various taxes. In 1931, for non-⁠payment of one of them, Father Demetrius was sentenced to four months of forced labour. The punishment was not linked with loss of freedom, and the priest came to the village at all the church feasts and served. In 1933 he was awarded the pectoral cross.

In 1937, in connection with the order of the Soviet government for the physical destruction of the Church, the authorities resolved to arrest the priest and close the church. In October 1937 testimonies of false witnesses were gathered, who said that the priest had conducted election agitation against the candidates put forward by the local Communists and proposed believing candidates, because of which the people voted against the Communist candidates. The chairman of the village soviet sent to the NKVD a certificate saying that thanks to the priest's agitation the Communist candidates could be passed only at the second attempt, and concluded that Rozanov's further stay in Pochinki was impossible. A group of residents of Pochinki, who afterwards also served as false witnesses, sent the NKVD a petition that the priest and the active members of the twenty be brought to trial for disrupting the elections.

On 12 November 1937 Father Demetrius was arrested, imprisoned at Kashira and questioned two days later. At the interrogations the investigator repeated all the false testimonies, but to each question, with the description of crimes not committed and the retelling of words not spoken, Father Demetrius answered in the same way: I did not say this and I do not plead guilty. On 16 November the investigation was completed, and on 19 November the NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a camp. In March 1938 his relatives received a letter from the station Izvestkovaya on the Ussuri railway, and with that all their contact with the priest ended. The priest Demetrius Rozanov died in Bamlag on 31 March 1938 and was buried in an unknown camp grave.