Evdokia Sheykova

Holy Blessed Martyr Evdokia Sheykova (Evdokia Alexandrovna Sheykova) was born on 11 February 1856 in the village of Puza, in the Ardatov district of the Nizhny Novgorod province (now Suvorovo, Diveevo district), into a peasant family, and was shot in August 1919, together with her cell attendants, by men of the Red Army. She was numbered among the new martyrs and confessors of Russia in August 2000. Our calendar remembers her on 5 August and on 23 May.

The paralysed woman of Puza

After the death of her parents she was brought up in the house of her uncle, the church warden. As a child she went with the pilgrims to the men's hermitage of Sarov, in honour of the Dormition of the Mother of God, to the Seraphim-⁠Diveevo convent of the Holy Trinity, and to the Seraphim-⁠Ponetaevsk convent. At twenty, after a severe illness, she was left paralysed. Young peasant women began to care for her. Every day they sang stichera before the icon of the Vladimir Mother of God, and on Tuesdays stichera with the akathist of the Iveron Mother of God. On that day many people came to Dunyushka. In the morning they began to pray from five o'clock. Because of her infirmity she could not go to church, and so the local priests, Archpriest Vasily Radugin and Priest John Rybakov, came to the girls on feast days with the Holy Gifts and gave her communion at home. Her spiritual father was the monk Anatoly of the Sarov hermitage.

Persecution

In the neighbouring village of Glukhovo lived a young peasant, Ilya Nemtsov (or Nemkov), who was a relative of Dunyushka. After a pilgrimage to Athos he had returned to the land of Nizhny Novgorod. The peasants began to honour him as a great man of prayer and to ask his counsel. In the years of the civil war he was called up into the Red Army. Coming on leave from the front, he decided not to go back and stayed in the village. Then he came to hate the God-⁠pleasing life of Dunya and her helpers. He began to come into their house, to hinder them in prayer and to mock them in every way. Once the militia stopped him and he was sent to Ardatov, but he ran away and came back to the blessed one. When she told him that he would be arrested again, he said he would run away again. In time everything Dunya had said came true, as the archive documents show.

On 31 July 1919 the provincial commission of Nizhny Novgorod for the struggle against desertion issued a mandate in the name of the Red Army man Skorobogatov. In August 1919 a detachment of about a hundred men was formed at Ardatov. In all the districts of the province operational troikas were set up, with the powers of a military revolutionary tribunal, with the right to impose fines on the population, to confiscate property and even to shoot hardened deserters. Skorobogatov called the locals together in the evening to a meeting and spoke to them. On suspicion of hiding a deserter, Evdokia and her cell attendants were sentenced to be shot. Before death they received the Holy Mysteries from the priest of the Dormition church in the village of Puza, Father Vasily Radugin.

After mockery, the women were taken by cart to the cemetery, to a common grave prepared beforehand. Four volleys were heard. Maria, Dunya's cell attendant, was only wounded, and a Red Army man stabbed her with a bayonet. Then the locals were forced to bury them. The head of the punitive detachment, Kuznetsov, reported to the provincial military commissar at Nizhny Novgorod.

Veneration

The veneration of Evdokia and her helpers in the village never ceased. Right after the shooting miracles and healings began to occur at Dunyushka's grave. The peasants went there, to the cemetery, and prayed. After some years a cross and a fence were put up there. The Dormition church in the village of Puza (Suvorovo) was closed in 1939 and turned into a club. In time the news of the wonderworking grave in the Suvorovo cemetery spread far beyond the diocese of Nizhny Novgorod. Many miracles and healings of sick people who came there with faith and compassion for the martyrs began to be written down and told. With the blessing of Bishop Varnava (Belyaev) of Pechersk, his cell attendant, Valentina Dolganova, collected testimonies of the martyrs' end.

In August 2000 the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church numbered the martyr Evdokia and her cell attendants, Darya Timagina, Darya Ulybina and Maria, whose family name is unknown, among the new martyrs and confessors of Russia. In 2001 the relics of the martyrs of Nizhny Novgorod were opened and now rest in the church of the Dormition of the Mother of God at Suvorovo.