Evdokia Safronova

Holy Martyr Evdokia Safronova, born Evdokia Grigorievna Safronova, was born on 1 March 1878 in the village of Luchinskoe in the Zvenigorod district of the Moscow province, in a peasant family, and died in the camp on 25 August 1938. She was numbered among the saints in the year 2000 and is honoured among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church.

She completed two classes at the parish school. From 1890 she worked as a servant in Moscow, in the family of an official. In 1897 she married and moved to the village of Bykovo in the Bronnitsy district. In 1930 she was elected church warden and treasurer of the Nativity of Christ church in Bykovo, and the same year was deprived of electoral rights as an active churchwoman; they were restored to her on 2 June 1931.

On 1 November 1937 she was arrested in the case of the churchmen of the Bykovo parish, together with the priest-⁠martyrs John Kesariysky, Peter Kosminkov and the deacon Simeon Krechkov, who were shot on 16 November. During the investigation she was held in the Taganka prison in Moscow. At the first interrogation after her arrest she signed the record drawn up by the investigator, in which she admitted that she had belonged to the group of churchmen and had agitated against joining the collective farm. The next day she categorically denied the charges.

The Special Troika of the NKVD sentenced her to eight years in a corrective labour camp. She was sent to the Taishet camp in the Irkutsk region, where she died from the hard conditions, on 25 August 1938.

She is commemorated on 16 November, on 7 February in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (new style), and on 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.