Evdokia Tkachenko

Holy Venerable Martyr Evdokia Tkachenko, a nun, laboured at the Iveron-⁠Seraphim Monastery in the city of Verny in the Semirechye region (today Almaty in Kazakhstan), and received martyrdom by shooting in the summer of 1918. The Russian Church honours her among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the twentieth century.

The monastery had been founded in 1910, and its first abbess was the nun Paisia, who had laboured earlier at the John-⁠Maria Monastery in Stavropol. In 1913 Bishop Innocent Pustynsky, who headed the diocese, set as abbess of the monastery, against the wish of the nuns and of Hieromonk Seraphim Bogoslovsky, their spiritual father, the daughter of the chairman of the army board, General Bakurevich, the young ryassophore novice Taisia, tonsured with the name Euphrosyne.

Raised in a pampered environment, she was very spoiled and herself needed a strict educator. For this reason disorders began in the monastery, and the nuns began to leave. Hieromonk Seraphim lived at that time in the skete on Mount Kyzyl-⁠Zhar near Verny, and the nun Evdokia often visited him. In 1918 the godless came to power in Semirechye and, as everywhere, executions and persecution of believers began.

In the summer of 1918 the nun Evdokia came to Hieromonk Seraphim, who was then serving at the skete on Mount Medeo, to confess and receive communion. In the evening of the same day Red soldiers came to the Iveron-⁠Seraphim Monastery and demanded that the nuns hand over Abbess Euphrosyne, because she was a general's daughter. The nuns hid her in the barn among sacks of flour, and the soldiers, vexed, led out to be shot, in place of the abbess, the nuns Evdokia and Animaisa.

They stood them by the monastery wall and fired. The bullet hit Evdokia in the head and disfigured her face, and Animaisa was wounded in the shoulder, the sisters picked her up and she later recovered. Evdokia's friend, the nun Theodora, was so shaken by the shooting and by the way the bullet had disfigured the face of her companion that she fell ill from nervous shock and for a long time could not forget the bloodied, disfigured face.

The venerable martyr Evdokia then appeared to her in a dream and said: Theodora, why are you weeping, why are you afraid? Do not weep, you see that I am just as I was. After that she no longer saw the face of the venerable martyr disfigured and was healed.

She is commemorated on 28 September and on 7 February in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (new style).