Elias Rylko

Holy Hieromartyr Elias Rylko, a protopresbyter, was born in 1881 in the village of Rydomlya, in the Tolochin volost, Orsha district, Mogilev province, in the family of the peasant Ignatius Rylko. He finished the teachers' seminary.

From 1906 to 1913 he was a psalmist in the village of Khlebnoe. After receiving the priesthood in 1914 he served in turn in the villages of Usokhskaya Buda, Khlebnoe and Blagovichi. In 1934 he moved to the Moscow region and was assigned to the church of Saint Nicholas in Nikolskoe-⁠Gagarino, in the Novo-⁠Petrovsk district. The village had been bought in 1775 by Prince Sergei Sergeyevich Gagarin and took its name from its owner. The stone church, dedicated to Saint Nicholas the Hierarch, had been built in 1783, and in it Father Elias served the last years of his life. In 1936 he was raised to protopresbyter. On 23 September 1937 he was assigned to the church of Saint Elias in the churchyard parish of Ilinskoe, in the Solnechnogorsk district.

On 30 October 1937 Protopresbyter Elias was arrested and imprisoned in the Taganka prison in Moscow. The investigator asked him with whom he had ties. He said that he had good acquaintance with a certain Smolyakov and with the priest Kazantsev, both since arrested for anti-⁠Soviet agitation, and that their connection was only visits and talk about the collective farms and the church. When he was told that he was an active member of Smolyakov's counterrevolutionary group, he answered that he had belonged to no such group and had carried on no agitation against Soviet power.

The investigator also questioned the chairman of the collective farm, who said that he had heard the priest say that the constitution speaks of freedom of religion but in fact it is not given, and that Soviet power squeezes priests with taxes to put an end to religion. Another false witness said that the priest drew children into the church, among them his five-⁠year-⁠old son, whom he supposedly treated to "holy honey" and a gingerbread and taught to cross himself.

On 19 November 1937 the NKVD troika condemned him to death. Protopresbyter Elias Rylko was shot on 21 November 1937 at the Butovo firing range near Moscow and buried in an unknown common grave. The Church commemorates him, according to the Azbyka page, on 22 November, in the new style, and also on the movable days of the synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, of the Saints of Belarus and of the Saints of Moscow.