Konstantin Bogoyavlensky

Saint Konstantin Bogoyavlensky of Merkushino, Hieromartyr, was a young village priest of the Urals, shot in 1918, at twenty-⁠two, in the village of Merkushino in the Verkhoturye district. His relics were found in 2002, and the Russian Church numbered him among the saints that same year. He is commemorated on 14 July (27 July New Style), the day of his martyrdom.

Childhood and school

He was born on 18 May 1896 into the large family of the village teacher Stefan Grigoryevich Bogoyavlensky and his wife Evdokia Petrovna, in the Vladimir governorate, and was baptized the next day in the church of the Protection of the Mother of God at Petropavlovsky Pogost, with his elder brother and sister, Viktor and Klavdia, as godparents. In 1898 his father was ordained deacon at Yekaterinburg and served in the town's churches and at Verkh-⁠Isetsk. He died of typhus on 6 March 1912, and Konstantin and his sister Maria were left in the care of the diocesan board for poor clergy families, in great poverty.

In 1906 he entered the ecclesiastical school in Yekaterinburg, where readers and sacristans were trained. At first it was hard for him and he was held back for re-⁠examination in arithmetic, Russian and Latin, but he passed, studied well afterward and graduated in 1911, in the second category. He went on to the Perm seminary, living in the dormitory on Monastyrskaya Street; in the final year the seminary assigned unmarried men as readers and married men as priests.

At Merkushino

On 6 February 1917 Konstantin and his classmate Alexander Gashev were sent as priest and reader to the rich village of Merkushinskoe in the Verkhoturye district of the Perm governorate, where at the end of the seventeenth century the relics of Saint Simeon of Verkhoturye had been found. On 20 March another classmate, Grigory Startsev, came as reader. His ordination was delayed: the February Revolution broke out, Bishop Seraphim of Yekaterinburg was removed from his see for loyalty to the tsar and no other was named at once. On 21 April the consistory asked the Holy Synod to allow ordination by a neighbouring bishop, in view of great need. It is not known who ordained him, but probably the vicar of Chelyabinsk, Seraphim Alexandrov, who was governing provisionally. From 19 May 1917 his signature appears in the parish registers, showing that he was a priest. He had married on 12 April 1917 Raisa Fyodorovna Sidyakova. Merkushino was also a place of pilgrimage, and its people lived by farming, logging and rafting timber, hunting and crafts.

Martyrdom

In the summer of 1918 the event that Soviet historiography called the "wooden war" took place in the Merkushino district, an uprising against Soviet power; it is not clear whether it was an uprising or only a procession to Verkhoturye, in which mostly women took part, with axes or with nothing. The uprising was put down, and a wave of reprisals followed. On 14 (27) July 1918 the Soviet organs shot in the village cemetery Fr Konstantin, who had not led the procession and probably had not even taken part in it, the church warden and two peasants, forcing them to dig their own grave, in view of villagers gathered by force. It is told that on the way from the church to the place of execution Fr Konstantin sang his own funeral service. On 17 (30) July he was buried in the church grounds by the priest Alexei Khlynov, Deacon Feodor Alekseyev and the reader Alexander Gashev.

Finding of the relics

In the 1930s all the churches of Merkushino were closed and destroyed. In 1997 a metochion of the New Tikhvin convent of Yekaterinburg was founded there. During the rebuilding of the church of the Archangel Michael, on 31 May 2002, on an ordinary working day, a grave was struck, the coffin lid shifted and incorrupt remains were seen in priestly vestments, with a small Gospel book in a metal binding beside them. On the ground where two hundred and some years earlier the relics of Saint Simeon of Verkhoturye had been found, incorrupt remains were found a second time. Experts were invited to identify them: the head of the regional bureau of forensic medicine and the head of its medico-⁠criminalistic department. The saint's identity was established only through expert examinations and archival documents. Members of the canonization commission noted that the burial had been done in haste: the coffin was buried only 50 cm deep, no footwear was found (it may have been removed before the execution), the coffin was a stranger's, with the head against the lid and the feet pressed hard against the bottom board, instead of fine shavings there were very coarse ones, and under the head, instead of a pillow, were two birch brooms; the skirts of the phelonion were thickly dripped with candle wax, probably because the burial was done in darkness, and the vestments were of different sets.

Veneration

The relics were placed in the church of the Archangel Michael. On 26 September 2006 a baptistery church dedicated to Saint Konstantin of Merkushino was consecrated, with a two-⁠metre stone font for baptism of adults, after the example of the baptisteries of the time of Constantine the Great; baptism there is free of charge. Beside his grave other graves were found, with only bones. At the Saint Simeon metochion in Merkushino a record is kept of miracles worked through prayers to the saint: women unable to bear children who gave birth after praying at his relics, a man who had gone blind after a haemorrhage and recovered his sight, and a young seminarian, Daniil, who received at the relics a clear answer about his path in answer to prayer, and whose parents, little given to belief, began to attend church.