Evdokia Sinitsyna

Holy Venerable Martyr Evdokia Sinitsyna, a novice, was born in 1879 in the village of Troparevo in the Mozhaisk district of the Moscow province, in the family of the peasant Ephraim Sinitsyn, and received martyrdom by shooting on 20 March 1938, at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. The Russian Church honours her among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the twentieth century.

In her youth she entered the Prince Vladimir Monastery, near the village of Filimonki in the Podolsk district, as a novice. This monastery had been founded in memory of the preservation of the life of the Emperor Alexander III and his family in the railway disaster of 17 October 1888. The empress's lady-⁠in-⁠waiting, Princess Vera Borisovna Sviatopolk-⁠Chetvertinskaya, sent on 9 January 1889 a petition to this end to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, governor-⁠general of Moscow.

Wishing to test whether the plan could be carried out, she invited twenty-⁠five sisters to her estate near Filimonki and, when it became clear that the income of the estate sufficed for their upkeep, in February 1890 she sent a further petition to the Moscow Spiritual Consistory. Permission was received on 3 October 1890. After the founding, under the guidance of the abbess, three nuns and a hundred novices laboured in the monastery.

Evdokia lived there until the closing of the monastery in 1929, then settled in the village of Filimonki with a distant, sick relative. At the beginning of 1938 standing witnesses gave against her the testimony that the NKVD needed: that she spread church literature, instilled religious convictions, drew people into church circles and worked especially among youth and children, attracting them with gifts, so that many leave the Komsomol, and that priests unknown by name came to her from Moscow and held secret conversations of an anti-⁠Soviet character.

The chairman of the village council said that Sinitsyna conducted anti-⁠Soviet work covertly and that the former priest of the monastery often visited the nuns. On 25 February 1938 the novice Evdokia was arrested, put in prison at Serpukhov and interrogated.

The investigator told her that after the closing of the monastery she had said that in any case Soviet power would not last long and all churches and monasteries would work again. She answered that after the closing she had often spoken of the monastery with various persons, that she had only said that some nuns had lived well in the monastery and now fared badly, but nothing against Soviet power.

To the charge that she had instilled religion in children she said that every summer she met the children of workers and collective farmers and, because flowers grew by her house, she often gave them flowers, but did not instil religion. To the charge relating to October 1937 she said that then a priest from the village of Peredeltsy had indeed been in her house, come to give communion to a sick woman who lived with her, and they spoke of the Church and religion, but not against Soviet power.

On 8 March 1938 the NKVD troika sentenced her to death. Shortly before the execution she was moved to the Taganka prison in Moscow. The novice Evdokia Sinitsyna was shot on 20 March 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo range.

She is commemorated on 20 March, on 29 May in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, and on 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.