Gregory Shuisky

Holy Righteous Gregory Shuisky (Gregory of Kitovo, near Shuya), a priest, died no later than the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The saints of Kitovo (those who "in the village of Kitovo are the wonderworkers of Shuya") are the priest Gregory, his daughter Euphrosyne and the laymen Artemy and Dimitry. They are mentioned in hagiographic collections from the end of the seventeenth century: in Filimonov's icon painter's manual, with a commemoration on 30 September, in the Description of Russian Saints and in some menologia.

The saints' relics, known from the 1650s, rested in the Annunciation church in the village of Kitovo (today 3 km north of the town of Shuya, Ivanovo region). On 17 May 1659 the Annunciation church, in which the tombs of the Kitovo wonderworkers already stood, burned, and the gravestones were damaged. That same year Archbishop Stephen of Suzdal blessed the building of a new church in place of the burned one and the setting of the tombs where the relics rest. It was not clear whether the relics lay exposed in wooden tombs, burned with the church, or under the ground; Archimandrite Pavel of the Saint Nicholas monastery of Shartom was to investigate, but the documents of the inquiry have not survived. In the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries the church was rebuilt several times; in 1839 a new stone church was consecrated, closed on 26 July 1931 and later demolished.

The veneration of the Kitovo saints, as "little-⁠known" saints, about whom there are no written accounts and whose relics had not been examined, probably ceased in the first half of the eighteenth century. At that time the relics were secretly reburied by decision of the diocesan authorities, probably at Kitovo or in the neighbouring village of Drozdovo, and today their location is unknown. Yet it can be thought that the memory of them remained in the nineteenth century: a drawing after an icon of the second half of the nineteenth century shows, against the background of Shuya, the righteous Gregory of Kitovo and Venerable Joachim of Shartom under the wonderworking Shuya-⁠Smolensk icon of the Mother of God.

Veneration of the Kitovo saints in the whole Church was established in the 1980s, in the preparation of the Menaia. Their names were entered in the Synaxis of All Saints Shining in the Russian Land, in that of the Saints of Vladimir and in that of the Saints of Ivanovo, from which they were removed in 2015, among saints whose canonisation data are lacking. In the mid-1990s a commemoration of them at the great ektenia was introduced in several churches of Shuya and the Shuya district. He is commemorated on 6 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir.