Michael Markov

Holy Hieroconfessor Michael Markov, a priest, was born in 1868 in Moscow, to the psalm-⁠reader Fyodor Markov. During his studies he went with a companion on holidays to the village of Amerevo in the Bronnitsy district, from which his father came. There he met his future wife, Alexandra Vasilievna Vsekhsvyatskaya, with whom he had ten children. In 1887 he graduated from the theological school, and since the church at Amerevo needed a reader, he entered that post.

In 1919 he moved to the church of Saint Sergius in the village of Gory, Ozery district, Moscow province, first as reader, soon ordained deacon and, in 1923, priest. The rector there was Archpriest Pavel Nevsky. The village had two churches, and in the other the priest Mikhail Troitsky served. Father Michael and his wife were known for great mercy: there was always some poor or destitute person lodging with them, and a gravely ill beggar died on their stove. According to relatives, Alexandra Vasilievna boiled jam in basins, and everything was given to the poor.

The chairman of the volost soviet looked kindly on the priest and his wife, whom he valued for her hospitality to strangers. When the authorities resolved to drive out the peasants and drew up lists of the "disenfranchised", on which the priest's family was to be entered, he came to Alexandra Vasilievna and said, "While Father Michael is here, come, I shall divorce you." They went to the volost soviet, where the chairman wrote out the documents of the priest's divorce from his wife, backdated. Because of this the wife and children did not go onto the lists, and when Father Michael was arrested, no one in his family was exiled, and the house remained theirs. The times were such that sometimes children were afraid to meet their parents openly, if the parents were persecuted; one of the daughters, living at Ozery, asked to be brought secretly in a cart, under hay.

Father Michael did his duty and went without fail to everyone who asked for anointing and Communion. The authorities disliked this: at the beginning of January 1930 they came with a search and found in the icon corner a pyx for the Holy Gifts, which was enough for a criminal case. On 24 January 1930 the people's court of the Ozery district sentenced him to three years of exile, accusing him of theft of church property. The sentence had not yet been carried out when, in the night from 2 to 3 February, he was arrested and held at Kolomna, together with the priest of the Entry church and some parishioners, on a charge of "malicious anti-⁠Soviet agitation" using religious prejudices. On 6 February he was interrogated. He answered that they had talked with citizens about the collective farms, fearing the ruin of peasant farms, that he was aggrieved at the taxes beyond the strength of the clergy and the Church, in which he saw a persecution of religion, and that at a meeting he had told the faithful that if the money for the tax was not collected the church would be closed. Little money was collected and the church was closed. On 12 February a witness, a peasant from the village of Kamenka, was questioned, who said that the priest, at every opportunity, told people that religion was persecuted by the authorities and that taxes had strangled the peasants.

On 27 March 1930 the OGPU troika sentenced him to five years of exile in the Russian North. He was exiled to Komi, where in the early thirties a cruel famine broke out, so that nothing was left to the exiles to eat but nettles. Father Michael, of weak health by nature, did not endure the famine and died. The Church remembers him with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 25 January in the new style (7 February in the old) or on the Sunday nearest to 25 January.