Elizabeth Krymova

Holy Martyr Elizabeth Krymova was born in 1877 in Serpukhov in the Moscow province, in the family of the worker Nikolai Krymov, and received martyrdom by shooting on 31 October 1937, at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. The Russian Church honours her among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the twentieth century.

The family was poor. Her father soon died, and her mother, a washerwoman, could not feed the children, so she had to give Elizabeth to an orphanage. Until 1917 she lived there and worked as a linen seamstress. After 1917 she lived in the city with her brother, a disabled man who needed constant help. Though in poor health, he took a job as a clerk at a factory, and his sister lived on his support, keeping house.

Until the closing, in 1924, of the Vladychny Alexeevsky convent in Serpukhov, she went there to pray, keeping all her life very close relations with the nuns and helping them as she could.

On 19 May 1931 more than thirty priests and nuns of the Vladychny convent were arrested in Serpukhov, and with them Elizabeth Krymova. They were accused of aiming to create discontent among the population by the measures of Soviet power and of using churches and their homes for anti-⁠Soviet agitation. Elizabeth answered the investigator that she went to the Dormition church and that at the service the metropolitans Peter of Krutitsy and Sergius, and also Bishop Joasaph, were commemorated, that she did not agree with the policy of Soviet power on religion, because it offended her religious feelings, and that in 1929 nuns had lived in her home.

On 16 July 1931 the OGPU troika sentenced her to three years of exile. She was sent from the Butyrka prison to Kazakhstan. Her brother asked the OGPU to review her case, in view of his poor health, but the request was left without result.

Elizabeth returned to Serpukhov in 1934. At the same time a hieromonach returned from exile, appointed to serve at the church of Saint Nicholas in the city, and, having no lodging, asked Elizabeth and her brother for help, and they kindly took him into their home. At the height of the persecution, on 2 October 1937, Elizabeth was arrested together with the hieromonk and imprisoned at Serpukhov.

During the investigation, unable to withstand the pressure of the investigators, the hieromonk said that she had carried on anti-⁠Soviet activity with him. Elizabeth answered that in 1931 she had been arrested as an active churchwoman with several nuns, that she had kept ties with the clergy but had not carried on anti-⁠Soviet agitation and did not admit guilt. She was then sixty years old and, according to the prison doctors, was entirely unfit for physical work because of the frailty of age and myocarditis.

She was moved to the Taganka prison in Moscow, where on 17 October 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced her to death. She was shot on 31 October 1937 at Butovo and buried in an unknown common grave.

She is commemorated on 31 October, on 29 May in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, and on 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.