John Flerov

Holy Hieromartyr John Flerov, a priest, was the builder and first servant of the church of the Holy Archangel Michael in the village of Semyany, in the Vasilsursk district of the Nizhny Novgorod province. The church had been built and consecrated shortly before the revolution of 1917. After the consecration the father said: "My church will stand for a long time, and no one will come near it." So it was, but he himself was arrested in the winter of 1918, at the age of forty, and taken to Vasilsursk.

In the prison of Vasilsursk he was long tormented and constantly called to interrogation, being asked to renounce Christ or the priestly rank. The priest would not consent. Then they led him out to the cemetery and ordered him to dig a grave. After he had dug it, he prayed. When he had finished, he said: "I am ready." He was killed by a volley in the back, and the page says that from then on the church had an intercessor before God.

The unbelievers could not close the church for a long time, and when they closed it they could not tear it down, though they wanted to, because it was a monument that reproached them: the builders and the peasants who had donated were still alive. The parishioners did not hand over the keys. The keeper of the keys, Tatiana, was visited by a believing friend, who told her that they would be taken anyway. Tatiana answered: "Let them take us, we shall go not for something but for God." In a time of persecution, the cunning chairman of the village council summoned her and asked for the key, saying that the church had to be opened. She answered him: "You are lying, you will not open the church now, I will not give you the key, even if you put me in prison with my whole family, until you announce that there will be a service in the church." The chairman gave up, and the church remained untouched until its reopening in the 1940s.

In the same village the priest John Bystrov was born, who was martyred later. The Church commemorates Father John Flerov on 4 October, in the new style, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the new martyrs and of the Saints of Nizhny Novgorod.