Elias Cheredeev

Holy Hieromartyr Elias Cheredeev, a priest, was born on 20 July 1878 in the city of Kashin in the Tver province, in the family of the priest John Cheredeev. In 1901 he graduated from the Tver Theological Seminary and was ordained priest. He served at the church in the village of Vysokovo in the Nerl district. He was shot on 29 December 1937.

When the persecutions of the Church began at the end of the 1920s, the local authorities drove him out of his house, took all his property and, under threat of arrest, told him to leave the district. He went to relatives in Kashin, and from there he received an appointment from the holy Archbishop Thaddeus to the church in the village of Stelkovo, in the Kalyazin district. In 1931, following custom, he went round the houses of his parishioners with moleben services and other rites, and for this he was arrested, sentenced to six months of forced labour and sent to serve it on the collective farm of Stelkovo. In 1934 Archbishop Thaddeus appointed him to the church in the village of Konstantinovo in the Kalyazin district. His wife had died by then, and his only daughter, who was twelve, was raised with the help of his unmarried sister Natalia Ivanovna. He served there until the summer of 1937, when it became known that the authorities meant to close the church on the pretext that the faithful had stopped repairing it.

After the vigil of the feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God, Father Elias gathered the most active parishioners in the watchman's lodge and told them that the authorities planned to close the church, tear it down and use the brick for a theatre in Kalyazin. "I call on you, believing people, to resist the giving up of our church to mockery. It has stood here for two hundred years; better that we collect money and adorn the house of God." The next day he and the churchwarden went round the parish for donations and gathered enough for repairs. Within two weeks the work was finished, the roof painted and the walls whitewashed, so that the church looked newly built.

But he did not serve there for long. He was arrested on 21 December 1937. In Kalyazin a medical examination showed that he was gravely ill with myocarditis and unfit for physical labour, but able to walk to Kashin, where the nearest prison was. The same day he was sent to the Kashin prison and soon interrogated. The investigator told him that he was arrested for anti-⁠Soviet agitation among the collective farmers and asked whether he admitted guilt. The priest answered that he had never spoken against Soviet power and did not admit guilt. With that the interrogation ended. Despite the investigator's threats, Father Elias refused to incriminate himself or others.

On 27 December the NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 29 December 1937 the priest Elias Cheredeev was shot. He was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia by the jubilee Council of Bishops of August 2000, for veneration throughout the Church. The Church commemorates him on 29 December, the day of his martyrdom, in the new style, as well as in the synaxis of the new martyrs (on the movable day near 7 February) and on 18 July in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver.