John Blumovich

Saint John Blumovich, hieromartyr, was a priest of the Russian Church, born in Warsaw in 1888 and shot near Simferopol on 13 April 1938. He was canonized in 2000, for veneration throughout the Church. He is commemorated on 31 March by the old calendar, which is 13 April by the new, and in the Synaxis of the new martyrs and confessors of Russia.

He was born in 1888 in Warsaw, in a worker's family. Besides him, the family had another son, Nikolai, and two daughters, Elizaveta and Maria. At the beginning of 1918 he moved with his wife to Moscow. He entered the Moscow Theological Academy, which he finished in 1923, and then received the priesthood. From 1926 he served in the city of Kryvyi Rih in Ukraine. From 1929 he served at the church in the city of Orikhiv, in the Zaporizhzhia region. From 1935 he served at the church of the Protection of the Mother of God in Sudak, in Crimea. He was on friendly terms with Archbishop Porphyry Gulevich of Simferopol, with whom he always stayed when he was in Simferopol.

On 29 July 1937 he was arrested on a charge of espionage and of forming a fascist spy organization, and on 14 February 1938 the NKVD troika sentenced him to death under article 58 (paragraphs 6, 10 and 11). He was shot on 13 April 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave on the outskirts of Simferopol.