Euphrosinus Antonov

Holy Venerable Martyr Euphrosinus Antonov, a hieromonk, was born on 15 June 1885 in the village of Menshikovo in the Opochka district of the Pskov province, in the family of the peasants Anton Kuzmich and Nadezhda Andreevna Antonov, and received martyrdom by shooting on 13 November 1937, at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. The Russian Church honours him among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the twentieth century.

Monastic life

After the zemstvo school in Opochka he helped his parents on the farm, and at sixteen he hired himself to a merchant and lived with him until 1910. The same year he entered the Spaso-⁠Eleazar Hermitage in the Pskov diocese as a novice, drawn, like many others, by the labours of Venerable Gabriel Zyryanov, who was then living in the monastery. Because of the war the monastery was evacuated to the Sedmiezerna Hermitage of the Mother of God in the Kazan diocese, where Euphrosinus, tonsured meanwhile, also moved; in 1922 he was ordained hieromonk.

In 1928 the hermitage was closed by atheist power and he was sent to serve at the church of the Resurrection in the village of Mansurovo in the Laishev district. From 1929 he served at the church of Saints Peter and Paul in the village of Luzhki, Moscow region, and a year later was appointed to the Holy Trinity and Boris and Gleb church in the village of Anosino.

There until recently had been the Anosino convent, first a common-⁠life monastery, then an artel, abolished in 1928, the nuns driven out and their dwelling occupied by members of a commune. The church had not been closed, and the nuns, scattered mostly in nearby villages, gathered for prayer at the convent, where the hieromonk Euphrosinus served.

The persecution of 1931

Seeing that the nuns kept the same monastic way of life and did not wish to leave the walls of their beloved convent, giving those around them also an example of faithfulness and Christian virtues, the authorities in the spring of 1931 decided to arrest all the nuns and novices of the neighbourhood and Father Euphrosinus. He was charged that he often gathered the nuns or came to their lodgings, directing them to anti-⁠Soviet work among the people, and the nuns were accused of gathering in villages, singing spiritual songs and thereby attracting people, even workers from the Dedovsk factory.

On 10 March 1931 the OGPU arrested the hieromonk Euphrosinus and twelve nuns and novices. Asked about construction in the village, he said that if there were communes like those of monasteries, created by labour, Soviet initiatives might be good. He denied having conducted anti-⁠Soviet agitation and said he was not guilty. Witnesses were questioned, a priest of Rozhdestvino, Michael Golubev, and a teacher of Anosino, the priest's son Anatoly Fiveisky, who said that the nuns and priest of Anosino were exponents of a monarchist counter-⁠revolutionary tendency. On 20 March 1931 the OGPU troika sentenced the hieromonk Euphrosinus to five years in a concentration camp.

Arrest and martyrdom

Returning from the camp, he was sent to serve at the church of the Resurrection in the village of Ramenye, Shakhovskoy district, and in March 1937 at the Sign church in the village of Korneevskoe, Lotoshino district. On 7 October 1937 he was arrested and put in Taganka. As a witness for the prosecution, the chairman of the local cooperative said that the priest had allegedly said in a sermon that Soviet power keeps raising taxes and life gets ever worse, that in the priest's lodging meetings were held with the windows curtained, that the priest had a connection with Lotoshino, from where old women came to him.

The church warden said that the priest in a sermon spoke of strengthening the church and of taxes growing year by year. Father answered the investigator that he had not conducted counter-⁠revolutionary agitation and refused to give testimony. On 11 November 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. The hieromonk Euphrosinus Antonov was shot on 13 November 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave at Butovo.

He is commemorated on 13 November, on 29 May in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, and on 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.