Joseph Sikov

Holy Hieromartyr Joseph Sikov was a priest in the Ural Mountains and received a martyr's death in 1918, shot by the Bolsheviks. He was the father of a large family and shepherded about five thousand faithful.

Joseph Fomich Sikov was born in 1873. In 1907 he finished the missionary school, and after a few years he was ordained deacon and served at the church of Saint Joachim in the Visimo-⁠Utkinsk plant, Verkhoturye district, diocese of Ekaterinburg. In 1914 he was ordained priest for the church of the Sign (of the Mother of God "of the Sign") in the Verkhny Tagil plant, Ekaterinburg district, Perm province, set at the headwaters of the river Tagil, on the eastern slope of the Urals, eighty versts from Ekaterinburg. The first inhabitants of the plant, as at all Ural plants, were exiles and schismatics who had fled into the mountains and forests to escape the persecution of the authorities.

The first church was built there in 1753. After the fire of 1861, which consumed most of the settlement, the stone church of the Sign was raised. In it stood as a holy treasure the icon of the Mother of God "of the Sign", preserved from the fire. With this icon solemn processions were made several times a year to the neighbouring villages, the icon remaining in each between one week and three. At the beginning of the twentieth century the parish had about five thousand faithful.

There Father Joseph served and lived with his large family, he had eight children. There too he received the crown of martyrdom, shot by the godless Bolsheviks on 14 June 1918. He is commemorated on 7 February (a movable day), in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 11 February in the Synaxis of the Saints of Ekaterinburg, and on 27 June, in new style.