Fevronia Yufereva

Abbess Fevroniya Yufereva (in the world Fekla Semyonovna, 1870-1930) founded and led the Protection Convent near the village of Zubari, in the Vyatka region, and died in prison. She is numbered among the locally venerated saints of the Vyatka diocese, and documents for her canonization are being gathered; her commemoration is on 25 June (8 July).

She was born in 1870 in the village of Zotovtsy, Kotelnich district, Vyatka province, to Semyon and Anna Yufereva. From childhood, though she had a physical infirmity from birth, people came to her to ask for prayers and to learn the future. Her father set her in a bathhouse, where she began to receive them. Later a house was built at the edge of the forest, soon too small for the growing number of venerators. Fekla and her "sisters" moved onto the land of the village of Roslyaki, and in 1905 to a plot on the border between Zotovtsy and the Kostroma province; in 1905 fifty women lived with her. In 1907 a religious community was officially organised, in which a church was built dedicated to the icon of the Mother of God "Joy of All Who Sorrow".

Fekla received monastic tonsure with the name Fevroniya and was appointed head of the community, which grew to nearly a hundred members and took on a monastery rule. She was given three hundred and ten desyatinas of state forest, and in the years of the First World War the community received gifts of buildings, cattle and horses. Among the faithful of the Vyatka and Vologda provinces it was widely held that Abbess Fevroniya was a "saint" and a prophetess. Bishops and monks returning from exile stayed at the convent, and many came to hear her prophecies about the last times and the duration of Soviet power.

In the autumn of 1923 she and her supporters spread the rumour that the churches had lost grace and that the episcopal authority of the Renovationists must not be recognised. By 18 September 1923 she was arrested, judged "politically dangerous" and taken to Kotelnich, then to Vyatka. She died in custody on 16 December 1930 and was buried at the Fileyka cemetery in Kirov.

Healings are told of her, such as that of a sick man brought on a cart who went home on his own feet, and other signs of holiness. Into a spring nearby she is said to have cast a golden cross, saying: whoever comes here with faith will receive according to his faith. Since 2000, every year on 8 July, a procession goes from the village of Arkhangelskoye to the site of the ruined convent at Zubari, to the holy spring.