Elias Zachateysky

Holy Hieromartyr Elias (Ilya Alexandrovich Zachateysky) was a priest, born on 12 July 1884 in the village of Chaplygino, Bronnitsy district, Moscow province, and shot on 9 December 1937 at the Butovo firing range. The Russian Church numbered him among the saints as a holy hieromartyr, for veneration throughout the Church, by decision of the Holy Synod of 26 December 2001. He is commemorated on 26 November (9 December by the new calendar), in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo.

He was born into the family of the priest Alexander Nikolaevich Zachateysky, who served at the Nativity of the Mother of God church at Chaplygino, then at that of the village of Cherkizovo. His three sons were priests: Nikolai (born 1876) was rector of the church of Saint Nicholas at Starki, then of the Pokrovskaya at Nikulino; Grigory (born 1878) was priest of the same church of Saint Nicholas. Of six daughters, Paraskeva was the wife of the priest Pavel Nekrasov, and Evgenia, a pupil of the Moscow diocesan girls' school, taught at the school in Cherkizovo.

In 1899 he finished the theological school at Kolomna and in 1905 the Moscow theological seminary. From 1912 until his arrest on 25 November 1937 he served as priest at the church of the Protection of the Mother of God in the village of Kupelitsy, in the Vereya district, Moscow region. The first time he was arrested on 7 January 1930, accused of not informing the authorities of the counter-⁠revolutionary remarks of a deacon, and was sentenced to six months in prison. The second arrest came on 25 November 1937. He was imprisoned in the Mozhaisk prison.

They accused him of active participation in the Vereya uprising against the Bolsheviks in 1918. He answered that he had not taken an active part, but that he had given the insurgents the keys of the church, and they rang the bells, calling the population to revolt. They also said that at the removal of the bells in 1935 he urged believers to resistance, saying that Soviet power was robbing and ruining the churches of God, that they would take the bells and then close the churches, and that people would walk like unbelievers, sunk in sins. On 29 November 1937 the "troika" of the NKVD administration for the Moscow region sentenced Father Elias to death, under article 58-10, for "counter-⁠revolutionary activity and anti-⁠Soviet agitation". He was shot on 9 December 1937 at the Butovo range and buried in an unknown common grave.