Matrona Konyukhova

Holy Martyr Matrona Konyukhova was born in 1848 in Moscow, into the family of the peasant Stepan Konyukhov. The people knew her as blessed Matrona of Dorogomilovo, after the district near the Kiev station, beyond the Borodino bridge, where she lived in a small wooden house with her much younger sister Natalia.

In old age she went blind, yet those who knew her remembered a spiritual woman, understanding and very kind. The two sisters lived in great poverty. Matrona received visitors sitting on her bed, in monastic dress. In her youth she had been married; the couple attended the church of Saints Constantine and Helen in the Taininsky Garden of the Kremlin, where Archpriest Valentin Amfiteatrov served. According to a recollection kept by those close to her, the priest once told her husband that his wife would die within three days, and the husband agreed to die in her place. He died, and Matrona remained the priest's helper and received monastic tonsure.

Little is known of the years before the persecution, but by the 1930s she was already regarded as an ascetic, and people asked her to pray for them. On 26 August 1937 she was arrested by the NKVD, at the age of eighty-⁠nine. At her interrogation on 31 August she said that she lived on the gifts of her many admirers, that she told them to endure and to pray, and that she sent them to church and to the grave of Father Valentin Amfiteatrov. Asked whether people should join the collective farms, she gave guarded answers, saying that if they could bear it they had better not join, since in a collective farm they would have to forget the church. She admitted that people thought her blessed and clairvoyant, but said that she herself had never claimed this.

She was accused of belonging to a counter-⁠revolutionary church group, of receiving crowds of visitors and of organizing pilgrimages to the priest Valentin's grave. On 7 December 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced her to death. She was shot on 15 December 1937 at the Butovo range near Moscow and buried in an unknown common grave.

Holy Martyr Matrona is commemorated on 15 December, the day of her death, in the new style, and together with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.