Eugenia Lysova

Holy Venerable Martyr Eugenia Lysova, a nun, was born in 1892 in the village of Nikitkino in the Yegoryevsk district of the Ryazan province, in the family of Athanasius Lysov, owner of a small grocery, and died in the camp near Tashkent on 17 November 1935. At baptism she was given the name Evdokia. The Russian Church honours her among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the twentieth century.

Monastic life

She studied at the parish school. In 1916 her parents died, and her two sisters were already married and living apart; raised in piety, Evdokia resolved to dedicate her life to the service of the Lord. She sold her livestock, gave the parental house to her sister and received in exchange a small cottage, where she made herself a cell. In the time of persecution by atheist power, having as spiritual father a monk of the Bogoslovsky Monastery in the Ryazan region, she was tonsured in 1926 a nun with the name Eugenia. When the monastery was closed, she returned to her native village and served there at the Protection church.

The arrest of 1931

In 1931 the sisters of the Kazan Monastery at Kolychevo were arrested and shut in prison at Yegoryevsk. Right after their arrest, believers and nuns of closed monasteries, many of whom had settled in Yegoryevsk then, organized help with parcels of food and goods. About ten nuns kept watch day and night near the prison, so as to be able to say farewell to the confessors at the moment when they would be led from the prison to the station.

At last it became known that the sisters of the Kazan convent would be moved by transport on 12 June. On that day, from ten in the morning, nuns, clergy and believers began to gather at the prison gate, about a hundred in all. Later a witness declared that the priests and nuns had agitated among the townspeople that Soviet power had begun a policy of definitive destruction of religion, judging and exiling innocent people.

Before the nuns were brought out of the prison, when there were many believers in the square, militiamen appeared who began to arrest those gathered. Seeing this, some began to run away. In the following days arrests were also made among nuns and believers in Yegoryevsk and nearby villages.

The nun Eugenia was arrested on 25 June 1931 and taken to the prison in Yegoryevsk. Answering the investigator, she said that after her parents' death she began a monastic life, that she went and still goes to church, serves with the priest and holds to this life. In all eighteen people were arrested in this case. On 16 July 1931 the OGPU troika of the Moscow region sentenced the nun Eugenia to three years of exile in Kazakhstan, the term reckoned from 12 June, when the nuns had been arrested in the square.

After exile

In 1934, at the end of her exile, the nun Eugenia returned to her homeland and settled at Yegoryevsk, where other nuns and clergy had returned from exile. She began to help at the church of the Holy Right-⁠believing Prince Alexander Nevsky. Nuns, novices and pious women began to celebrate the appointed services in houses, and in towns and villages small monastic communities formed. In the house at Yegoryevsk, with the nun Eugenia, lived the schema-⁠nun Agnia of the Kolychevo Monastery and a pious woman who later received monasticism with the name Seraphima; they were helped by a teacher, Olga, who very much wished to become a nun but because of the persecution was not blessed to do so.

Many then feared to pray, and common prayer in a house, even simply the reading of the Psalter or of the midnight office, the celebration of vespers, matins or the noon office, was equated with violation of the law on the separation of Church from state and carried the risk of prison. Many feared to gather in houses for prayer, but Eugenia, answering these fears, said: I have been in exile, I am not afraid.

By the time of the new arrests the schema-⁠nun had died, and all the others, among them the nun Eugenia, were arrested in April 1935. The investigator asked her where and when she took part in secret prayers in the homes of believers; she answered that she had not been at any secret prayer, that perhaps there were some in Yegoryevsk but she did not know, and that she did not admit guilt.

On 14 June 1935 the Special Council of the NKVD sentenced her to five years in a corrective labour camp, and she was sent to a camp near Tashkent. From the camp she wrote to relatives to send her rusks; then she wrote not to send her anything more, because their camp was being moved to another place, and when they arrived she would send the new address.

But the conditions of that transfer were so hard that she could not endure them. The nun Eugenia Lysova died on 17 November 1935 in detention and was buried in an unknown grave.

She is commemorated on 17 November, on 7 February in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (new style), on 23 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Ryazan, on 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow and on 8 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Central Asia.