Elias Izmaylov

Holy Hieromartyr Elias Izmaylov, a priest, was born in 1882 in the village of Khormaly, in the Tsivilsk district of the Kazan province (today the Ibresi district of Chuvashia), in the family of the peasant Izmail. The family had five children. He learned at the church school, sang in the choir from childhood and later led it. In 1916 he was called into the army and returned at the end of the war. Taken with the idea of freedom, in 1918 he was chairman of the land committee of the volost, and from 1918 to 1920 he worked in its executive committee.

In 1925, unmarried, he received the priesthood from Bishop Herman (Kokel) of Alatyr, who was then in exile at Kozya Sloboda near Kazan, where the ordination took place. The priest of Khormaly, Krasnov, had joined the Renovationist movement, and on his return to Chuvashia Bishop Herman drove him out with the faithful and set the Orthodox priest Elias Izmaylov over the parish. The same year Father Elias was deprived of the right to vote as a "servant of the cult". In February 1930 the authorities closed the church in Khormaly, but the parish council, of which he was secretary, wrote to the Central Executive Committee, pointing out that eighty percent of the parish asked for its opening. The church was reopened and the priest went on serving.

On 25 March 1932 he was arrested and imprisoned in Tsivilsk, in the case of the "True Orthodox Church" group led in Chuvashia by Archimandrite Agathangel (Yetrukhin), whose members did not recognize Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) as head of the Russian Church. At the interrogation he said that at services he commemorated Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsy and all the "true Orthodox" bishops, but did not commemorate Metropolitan Sergius, at the insistence of some parishioners. Asked whether he belonged to a group of sectarians, he answered: "I am not a member of a group of sectarians, but of a group of believers. I believe in one God. My political conviction is this: whatever government there may be in Russia, it is all the same to me." He held himself bravely at all the interrogations. He was sentenced to three years of exile in Kazakhstan, to the settlement of Zhilaya Kosa in the Guryev region, and returned to his native village on 24 March 1935.

The village church was closed, and Father Elias, together with the members of the parish council, pressed the authorities to open it and in the meantime served at home. In September 1936 Bishop Vladimir (Yudenich) of Cheboksary offered him a vacant priest's place at Soldybaevo, but he declined, believing that the church of Khormaly would be opened. Materials had even been prepared for repairing the building.

In the first wave of repression of 1937 he was arrested on 4 August and imprisoned at Alatyr. The same day came the only interrogation, lasting five and a half hours, at which he refused to sign the charge, since he did not admit guilt. False witnesses from among the collective farmers said that he organized the church activists for the opening of the church, that he baptized and buried at private houses and that the women had demanded the opening of the church at a meeting on 31 May. On 7 September the indictment was presented, and on 8 September the NKVD troika of the Chuvash ASSR condemned him to death.

The priest Elias Izmaylov was shot in the night of 17 September 1937 in the basement of an NKVD building in Alatyr and buried in the common grave in the NKVD yard. That night 34 people were shot, among them the priest Joseph Kudryavtsev and the Renovationist "archbishop" Timothy (Zaykov). The Church commemorates him on 17 September, the day of his death, in the new style, and also in the synaxis of the new martyrs (movable day, around 7 February) and, on a movable day, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Chuvashia, around 11 July.