Hryhoriy Nikolsky

Holy Hieromartyr Hryhoriy Nikolsky was a priest in the Kuban who received the crown of martyrdom in 1918. He was born on 13 November 1854 in the stanitsa of Yarizhenskaya, in the Don Host territory, to the Cossack priest Nicholas Grigorievich and Paraskeva Ivanovna. Raised in church, he studied at the theological school in Novocherkassk, then spent some years in state service, ending as head of the telegraph station of Tsarev district in Astrakhan province; there he also married Elizabeth Ivanovna.

At the end of 1883 he left service and entered the holy priesthood: on 13 November he was ordained deacon by Bishop Eugene of Astrakhan, and the next day, the feast of the apostle Philip, priest. He was appointed rector of the church of the Archangel Michael in Mikhailovskoye and for ten years served in village churches of the Enotaevsk and Tsarev districts, as a missionary in the Orthodox Missionary Society. In 1892 he moved to the Stavropol diocese, to the church of Saint Alexis in the stanitsa of Novoleushkovskaya, where he supported the church schools for Cossack children. In the early 1910s he began building a large three-⁠altar stone church, begun in 1912 and consecrated in 1914 in honour of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God.

In January 1915, at his own wish, he was transferred as priest to the Black Sea convent of Mary Magdalene, where he headed the school of the girls' section of the Kuban correctional shelter. He was known as a devout and kind pastor, even to pilgrims who came from distant stanitsas of the Kuban.

In 1918, at the start of the civil war, revolutionary detachments burst into the convent. On 27 June (10 July), as he served the Divine Liturgy in the Ascension cathedral, the soldiers did not dare to arrest him before the believers receiving Communion. After the service they seized him, drove him with bayonets outside the walls and beat him with rifle butts and boots; when he tried to make the sign of the cross they struck his hand. "We will give you Communion," they shouted, and fired a revolver into his mouth. His burial place is unknown.

On 4 April 2019 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church included his name in the Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, setting his commemoration on 27 June (old style; 10 July new style).