Maria Vinogradova

Holy Venerable Martyr Maria Vinogradova, a novice (1886-1938), was born in the village of Likhachevo in the Volokolamsk district, in a peasant family; her father died when she was two. In 1904 she entered the Sorrowful Monastery in Moscow. After it was closed, in 1922, she worked in a quilt artel and lived with seven nuns. She was arrested once in 1929, when church literature was found, and released after a few days. In 1933 she was refused a passport and had to leave Moscow; she moved to Volokolamsk and worked by the day in the peasants' gardens, and from 1935 was cleaner at the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in the village of Vozmishche, where several nuns of closed monasteries held services by the typikon.

Arrest and end

On 25 January 1938 she was arrested. A witness said that she had complained that Soviet power did not let one live and that she would probably be arrested too. Maria admitted that the nuns gathered to pray, but without outsiders, and that if she had urged women to come to church she did it from faith; she rejected the other testimonies as false. On 11 February 1938 the NKVD troika of the Moscow region sentenced her to death, and on 17 February she was shot at Butovo and buried in the common grave. She was rehabilitated in 1989 and numbered among the New Martyrs by decision of the Holy Synod of 6 October 2008.

She is commemorated on 17 February, the day of her death, in the new style, on the movable day around 29 May in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and on the movable day around 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.