John Ilinsky

Holy Hieromartyr John Ilinsky, a protopresbyter, was born in 1846 in the family of a sexton. A servant of the church of the village of Tomylovo, Simbirsk province, for forty-⁠five years, he was arrested on 13 September 1918 (old style) and shot at the edge of a forest the next morning, on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The Church commemorates him on 15 September in the old style, which is 28 September in the new style.

The priest of Tomylovo

The son of the sexton Efimy Ilinsky entered the Simbirsk Seminary in 1864 and finished it in 1870 with a certificate of the second category. He did not hurry to receive the priesthood or to marry, but for three years was a zemstvo teacher and received several rewards from the Ministry of Education. In 1873 he married Alexandra Ivanovna, aged eighteen, with whom he lived forty-⁠five years in love and harmony. The same year he was ordained deacon and, after a short time, priest by Bishop Eugene of Simbirsk and Syzran and sent to the village of Tomylovo, in the Sengiley district, where he served until his martyric death. In 1913 the village had 285 households and more than three thousand inhabitants.

From the first day he was catechist at the village school, and in 1880 he received thanks from the diocesan authorities. He enjoyed undoubted authority among the priests: from 1895 to 1899 he was a member of the deanery council, from 1886, for fourteen years, missionary of the deanery, and from 1911 missionary for the Simbirsk and Buinsk districts, in an area with many priestless schismatics and with Chuvash and Mordvin pagans. From 1893 to 1897 he was a teacher at the missionary school of Tomylovo, preparing his parishioners for the struggle with schism. He received the leg-⁠guard in 1884, the skufia in 1887, the kamilavka in 1894, thanks for fifty people brought from schism to Orthodoxy, the blessing of the Holy Synod in 1901 for aid to parishioners in a time of famine, the Order of Saint Anne, third class, in 1903 and the pectoral cross in 1906. In 1913, at forty years of priesthood, he was raised to the rank of protopresbyter. He had six children: Vladimir, a doctor who operated in the hospitals at the front, Alexander, an officer, Nicholas, a graduate of the officers' school, and the daughters Antonina and Alexandra, teachers, and Vera, the wife of a priest.

Martyrdom

In August and September 1918, in the Sengiley district, battles were fought between the army of the "white Czechs" and the red troops, and the Czech staff settled in Father John's house. On 12 September the Czechs retreated toward Syzran, and the reds entered the village. On 13 September the father served the vigil on the eve of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. After the service he was called to give communion to a sick parishioner. Vested in the epitrachelion and cuffs, with the pyx with the Holy Gifts on his neck, he came out of the church, but at the gate three red soldiers stood in his way. One of them tore with mockery from the seventy-⁠two-⁠year-⁠old old man the pyx with the Holy Gifts and, saying "Enough of your deceiving the people, you are arrested", threw it aside.

They did not let him take off his vestments or take leave of his family, but led him under guard to the station of Bezvodovka, where they interrogated him all night in a staff car. In the morning, around ten o'clock, the car was moved to a siding, and the priest was led toward the forest, so that a quarter of a verst from the railway, at the edge of the forest, he was shot. The killers dug a shallow pit, threw in the body and lightly covered it with earth, leaving it without burial. Most probably the red soldiers accused him of helping the Czechs, since the staff had been in his house.

For a long time the family knew nothing. Only in October did the priest's wife Alexandra Ivanovna learn of his death and the place of his body. On 25 October 1918 the family asked the executive committee of the Simbirsk province that he be buried as a Christian, without an answer. On 9 September 1919 the son Alexander asked again, saying that the body "lies buried only at a depth of about half a metre". No documents were found on any permission for the burial, but it may be supposed that the body was in the end buried in the parish cemetery of Tomylovo. The priest's property was partly plundered, partly confiscated by the committee of the poor; one cow was led away, another slaughtered. Only on 13 September 1919 did the revolutionary tribunal of Simbirsk decide that it had not enough material to accuse the priest Ilinsky of counterrevolution and that he had been shot by unknown persons whom it had not been possible to establish, closing the case and ordering the family's property returned. So the authorities recognized the unlawfulness of the killing but concealed the killers.

The page states that the saint's commemoration is kept on 15/28 September and on the day of the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (on a movable day), and on 3 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Simbirsk.