Elizabeth of Samos

Holy Martyr Elizabeth of Samos, born Elizabeth Nikolaevna Samosskaya, was born on 14 October 1860 in Nizhny Novgorod, in the family of a bank clerk. She received martyrdom by shooting on 14 November 1937, at Gorky. She was numbered among the saints at the Jubilee Council of Bishops of the Russian Church in the year 2000.

In 1877 she graduated from the Mariinsky Institute in Moscow and gave private lessons in French and German. After the revolution of 1917 she lived in the town of Semyonov in the Nizhny Novgorod province, where she was chair of the church council at the All Saints church. She opposed the closing of churches and brought the local people to their defence.

On 2 November 1937, with twenty-⁠five other people, she was arrested as an active participant in a counter-⁠revolutionary church and fascist organization of sabotage and terror and imprisoned at Gorky. She did not admit guilt. On 6 November 1937 the Special Troika of the NKVD of the Gorky region sentenced her to death. She was shot on 14 November 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave.

She is commemorated on 14 November, on 12 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Nizhny Novgorod, and on 7 February in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (new style).