Emilian Goncharov

Holy Hieromartyr Emilian Goncharov, a priest, was born on 5 August 1882 in the village of Staraya Poltavka in the Novouzensk district of the Samara province, in the family of the peasant Anthony Goncharov, and received martyrdom by shooting on 5 November 1937 at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. The Russian Church honours him among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the twentieth century.

The village had been founded in the first half of the nineteenth century by settlers from Left-⁠Bank Ukraine. At baptism his heavenly patron was Saint Emilian the Confessor, bishop of Cyzicus. After the town school in Vladimir, between 1904 and 1907 he was a novice at the Bogolyubovo Monastery near Vladimir. In 1907 he was accepted as reader at the church of Saint Andrew of Crete in the village of Andreevskoe-⁠Turkino and married Pelagia Ivanovna Kudryavtseva, with whom he had several children.

According to the short account of his life, in 1904 he graduated from the teachers' seminary in Vladimir. He was ordained deacon in 1921, then priest in 1930, and served first in churches of the Saratov diocese. In 1932 a priest he knew, Constantine Speransky, proposed that he move to the Nativity of Christ church in the village of Rozhdestveno in the Moscow region, where Speransky had served and where the priest had died. Father Emilian accepted and, with the blessing of the hierarchy, began to serve there. In 1933 he received the epigonation, and in 1936 the skufia.

On 7 October 1937 the authorities arrested him and imprisoned him at Volokolamsk. In a search of a barn that had once belonged to the church and in his time of service belonged to the school, twenty-⁠five rifle cartridges were found; on the grounds that the priest had been seen entering that barn, he was charged with possessing them and with counter-⁠revolutionary activity. The chairman of the village council, as a witness, said that in August 1937 the priest had said to him: why do you not allow me to go with icons to the homes of the faithful, when the constitution allows it, and on being told that without a doctor's certificate it could not be done, had added that Soviet power gave the constitution to deceive the people.

The investigator told him that he was arrested for counter-⁠revolutionary activity carried on with members of a counter-⁠revolutionary group, and he answered that he had done no counter-⁠revolutionary work among the people and had been a member of no group. This was the last answer of the interrogation. On 3 November 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. Father Emilian Goncharov was shot on 5 November 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave at Butovo.

He is commemorated on 5 November, on 29 May in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, on 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, and on 12 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Saratov.