Jacob Boykov

Saint Jacob Boykov, hieromartyr, was a priest of the Russian Church, from Bezhetsk in the Tver governorate, and died in a camp, of hunger, on 19 April 1943. He was numbered among the saints as a hieromartyr in the year 2000, for veneration throughout the Church. He was the brother of the holy hieromartyr John Boykov. He is commemorated on 6 (19) April, the day of his death, and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

He was born in the family of the priest Jacob Ivanovich Boykov, of the Protection prison church in Bezhetsk, and his wife Alexandra Vasilievna. In 1911 he finished the theological school at Bezhetsk, and in 1917 the theological seminary of Tver. In 1917 he entered the Moscow Theological Academy, but in 1918, for lack of means of living, he was forced to give up and return to Bezhetsk, where he became a teacher at the local real school. After some time he married a graduate of the diocesan school.

In 1923 he was ordained priest to the church of the Great Martyr Catherine in the village of Zakrupye, Bezhetsk district, where he served from 1923 to 1930. From 1930 to 1938 he served at the Annunciation church in the village of Knyazhevo, not far from Bezhetsk.

He was arrested in the night of 8 to 9 February 1938 by NKVD officers, on a charge of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation. He did not admit guilt. By the sentence of the NKVD troika of 13 February 1938 he was condemned to ten years in a labour camp in the Sverdlovsk region. He died in the camp, of hunger, on 19 April 1943. He was numbered among the new martyrs and confessors of Russia by decision of the Jubilee Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, held on 13 to 16 August 2000 in Moscow.