Eugene Elkhovsky

Holy Hieromartyr Eugene Elkhovsky, a priest, was born on 26 February 1869 in the village of Pustosha in the Sudogda district of the Vladimir province, in the family of a psalm-⁠reader, and received martyrdom by shooting on 29 October 1937, at Yaroslavl. The Russian Church numbered him among the saints at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in the year 2000.

At five he lost his mother and was brought up by the nanny Matrona Prokofievna. He graduated from the Vladimir church school in 1885 and the seminary in 1891, then between 1891 and 1895 was a teacher at the people's school near the Urshelsky crystal factory. On 19 November 1895 he was ordained deacon, and on 21 November priest for the churches in Rybnaya Sloboda in Pereslavl-⁠Zalessky, the Presentation and the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, on both banks of the mouth of the river Trubezh.

He was a teacher of the Law in the local parish schools and a member of the district branch of the diocesan school council. From October 1907, at the request of the abbess, he served at the Saint Nicholas convent in Pereslavl-⁠Zalessky and was teacher of the Law in the convent's parish school. In 1920 he was arrested but soon released. In 1923, after the closing of the convent, he served in the Annunciation church, which had become a parish church, of the former Saint Nicholas convent, and from April 1924 also at the Transfiguration cathedral in Pereslavl-⁠Zalessky.

After their closing he served at the church of Metropolitan Peter. In July 1924 Patriarch Tikhon raised him to the rank of archpriest, and later he was awarded the mitre. He was a connoisseur and lover of church singing and in all the churches where he served he formed fine choirs; already as a seminarian, in his native village of Pustosha, he taught the peasants to sing and formed a church choir.

In September 1930 he was arrested, was held in the prison of Alexandrov and was released in December the same year. On 18 October 1937 he was arrested by the Pereslavl NKVD section, in the case of the dean of the city, Archpriest L. I. Gilyarevsky, and sent to the prison in Yaroslavl. He was accused of belonging to an anti-⁠Soviet church-⁠monarchist organization. He did not admit guilt.

On 27 October 1937 the Special Troika of the NKVD of the Yaroslavl region sentenced him to death, and on 29 October he was shot. The place of execution and burial are not known precisely, but probably lie near the village of Selifontovo in the Yaroslavl district. In 1927 Father Eugene completed his Memoirs, in which he describes the church and civic life of Vladimir and Pereslavl-⁠Zalessky of the end of the nineteenth century and of the first quarter of the twentieth.

He is commemorated on 29 October, on 5 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, and on 7 February in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (new style).