John Boyarshinov

Holy Hieromartyr John Boyarshinov, a priest, served in the village of Sepych in the Perm province and was shot by the new authorities on 4 September 1918. The Azbyka page says that the pretext was the bell with which he called the faithful to the service. In the year 2000 he was numbered among the saints.

He was born in 1858 in the family of a craftsman. After the primary school in Ocher he was psalmist at the church of Saints Peter and Paul at the Pavlovsk works in the Okhansk district, and an associate of the missionary section in Okhansk. On 27 October 1900 Bishop Peter (Losev) of Perm and Solikamsk ordained him deacon at the Dormition church in the village of Putino, and he was catechist at the people's school in Putino. On 9 September 1902 he was ordained priest at the Edinoverie church of the Holy Archangel Michael in the village of Sitnikovo and appointed head and catechist of the parish school. In 1904 he returned to the Dormition church in Putino, as head of the Kizel parish school and teacher at the Putino zemstvo school. On 4 April 1912 he was appointed to the church of Saint Nicholas in Kuprosskoe, Solikamsk district, and for bringing schismatics to Orthodoxy he received a leg-⁠guard. On 3 May 1918 he was moved to the church of the Meeting of the Lord in the village of Sepych.

The village of Sepych is one of the oldest settlements of Old Believers in the upper Kama, settled at the end of the seventeenth century by exiled musketeers, but from the 1830s an Orthodox church was built too, and by the middle of the nineteenth century more than half the inhabitants had returned to Orthodoxy. In the summer of 1918 the village did not accept the events of the revolution. On 1 June a Red Guard detachment arrived, which terrorized the population by requisitions and beatings. The mobilization into the Red Army, announced on 15 August in the Perm province, was the last straw. On 17 August the village assembled, the Orthodox and Old Believers put aside their old enmity, chose leaders and decided to form a regiment of the People's Army. The Red Guards who remained were disarmed. The staff and an observation post were set up in the building of the church of the Meeting of the Lord, from whose bell tower agreed signals were given. A report of the security commission says that the priest rang the bells during the fighting: two strokes meant retreat, three meant advance. On 22 August the uprising dissolved and the red troops entered the village, and the investigating commission pronounced death sentences for eighty-⁠three people.

On 2 September 1918 the extraordinary commission decided, concerning the priest John Boyarshinov, that the bells had sounded the alarm throughout the uprising, that the bell tower had been made an observation post, that the priest had opened the church and allowed this, and that he was himself a participant. It decided that he be declared an outlaw and shot. Father John Boyarshinov was shot on 4 September 1918. The villagers wrote in the newspaper "Free Perm" about the priest of Sepych, cruelly shot: "Bright memory to the honest martyrs fallen by the hand of the traitors." In August 2000 he was glorified by the jubilee Council of Bishops among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

The Church commemorates him on 4 September, in the new style, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the new martyrs and of the Saints of Perm.