Eutychius Kachur

Holy Venerable Martyr Eutychius (Kachur) was a hegumen of the Russian Church. In the world he was Euthymius Viktorovich Kachur. He was born on 26 December 1891 in the settlement of Alekseyevka, Biryuch district, Voronezh province, and died as a martyr on 3 December 1937 at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. He was canonized in the year 2000.

He was born on the day of the commemoration of the holy hieromartyr Euthymius, bishop of Sardis. Before the revolution he received monastic tonsure with the name Eutychius and entered the brotherhood of a monastery in Kiev called Tserkovshchina. His ordination took place, it seems, after 1917. The place of Hieromonk Eutychius's service in the 1920s is not known. A certificate of April 1929, by which Bishop Barlaam (Kozulya) of Vinnytsia, administrator of the diocese of Kamianets-⁠Podilskyi, awarded him the pectoral cross, shows that he was already the superior of the Markianivsky skete in the Vinnytsia district. The document said that he was rewarded for diligent fulfilment of his pastoral duties and firm standing in the Holy Orthodox faith. After a time he was raised to the rank of hegumen.

He was first arrested in 1924 and held in custody for forty-⁠five days, and a second time in 1931, for two months. In 1937 he lived in the town of Zaraysk in the Moscow region. He was arrested on 22 November 1937 on a charge of anti-⁠Soviet agitation and held in the prison of the Kolomna district. On 27 November a three-⁠man NKVD tribunal sentenced him to death, and on 3 December 1937 he was shot at the Butovo range.

On 27 June 1989 he was posthumously rehabilitated by the prosecutor's office of the Moscow region. He was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia by a decision of the Holy Synod of 27 December 2000. On 1 April 2015, with the blessing of the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church headed by Metropolitan Onuphry of Kyiv, the feast of the Synaxis of the Saints of the Vinnytsia land was established, in which, among fifteen other ascetics tied to that region, Venerable Martyr Eutychius (Kachur) was included. The Synaxis is kept on 14 September by the new calendar, on the day of the beginning of the indiction, the church new year.