Hilarion Tsurikov

Holy Venerable Martyr Hilarion Tsurikov (1856-1937), a hieromonk, an Athonite monk, in the world Rodion Fyodorovich Tsurikov, was born on 8 April 1856 in the village of Krivopolyany in the Ostrogozhsk district of Voronezh province, in a peasant family. The family was deeply religious; both sisters of the future martyr became nuns, and he himself went to Athos, to the monastery of Saint Panteleimon, where he received tonsure with the name Hilarion. In 1913 Father Hilarion was taken from Athos in the case of the Name-⁠worshippers and tried; as he wrote himself in a questionnaire, by the field court-⁠martial and condemned to death for the Name of God, released for lack of proof.

Arriving in Moscow, he entered the brotherhood of the Protection of the Mother of God monastery in Moscow. After 1924 he moved to the farmstead of Solyony, where he lived with the Athonite monk Father Ioann (Laba), with whom he was soon arrested on the charge that they had gone against Soviet power and held to the old. The sentence was given: three years of exile in the Narym region. Freed from the first exile in October 1928, Father Hilarion again joined Father Ioann (Laba) and settled in the mountains at an apiary near the town of Frunze. On 2 February 1929 the monks were arrested a second time, with the same charge as the first time. The sentence was given: three years of exile in the town of Kyzyl-⁠Orda. After the second exile, Father Hilarion settled in the town of Mirzoyan, where his sisters, the nuns Magdalina and Gavriila, later came to him. There Father Ioann (Laba) also came after a time from exile. The hieromonks served regularly. The hieromonks Hilarion and Ioann are remembered and honoured to this day by the Orthodox of Taraz (formerly Mirzoyan). One memory: In Mirzoyan in the 1930s there were many exiles without a roof, and my parents Ioann and Tatiana, deeply religious people, wishing to please God, received them in their house. Mother prayed to God that at least once priests or monastics might come into the house. Once someone knocked at the gate, she opened it and saw two monks. They said to her: Tatiana, you called us, we have come to you. They were the Athonite monks Hilarion and Ioann, exiled to Mirzoyan, and they stayed with us. It was in 1936. Father Hilarion and Father Ioann had an antimension and secretly served the Liturgy in our house. Then my father built in the yard a cell for Father Hilarion, and he spent the whole of Great Lent in it in seclusion, eating a day only a prosphora with water. He slept on the floor on a reindeer skin. My father wished to make him a bed with a mattress, but Father Hilarion said: I would sleep on the soft and sleep through prayer. Father Hilarion's sister Natalia sometimes came to him. Many townspeople soon learned of the elders and began to come to them for prayer and counsel, but they did not receive everyone. After serving the Liturgy on Pentecost (20.06.1937) they said: This is the last time we have served at your house. Soon they will arrest us and shoot us. Mother said: Father Hilarion, we will hide you or take you somewhere. No, it is not needed, we wish to receive the crowns of martyrdom.

On 23 June 1937 the last arrest followed. Father Hilarion was charged with participation in a counter-⁠revolutionary organisation and defeatist agitation, and with being the leader of a secret monastery. At the investigation he did not admit guilt of participation in a counter-⁠revolutionary organisation. On 23 August 1937, in case no. 723, of Metropolitan Cyril (Smirnov), Metropolitan Joseph (Petrovykh), Archbishop Alexis (Orlov) and others, in which monks were implicated, the indictment was drawn up, in which besides the usual charges of counter-⁠revolutionary activity was added: Tsurikov Hilarion and Laba Ivan, leaders of the secret monastery in Mirzoyan, were under the leadership of Kobranov and Cyril Smirnov. They carried on counter-⁠revolutionary agitation about the coming fall of Soviet power and the restoration of the bourgeois order, made secret tonsures into secret monasticism. The sentence was given: the supreme penalty. On 4 September 1937 Father Hilarion (Tsurikov) was shot.

He is commemorated on 4 September, on 8 September, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Central Asian Metropolitan District, on 20 May, in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Russian Monastery of Saint Panteleimon on Athos, and on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (new style, some days movable).