New Martyrs of Butovo

The New Martyrs and Confessors of Butovo are the faithful and clergy who were killed at the Butovo firing range near Moscow in the years of Soviet persecution. On the fourth Saturday of Pascha the Russian Orthodox Church commemorates the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors who suffered at Butovo. This movable feast was added to the Menaion of the Russian Orthodox Church, with the blessing of Patriarch Alexei II, on 3 September 2003.

The Butovo landfill now lies within Moscow and is a place of mass graves of the victims of Soviet repressions in the 1930s and early 1950s. About a thousand people are known to have been shot there for their confession of the Orthodox faith. By the summer of 2003, 255 of them had been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. There is no other place in Russia where the relics of so many saints have been gathered. The landfill lies on the land of the former Drozhino estate, known since the sixteenth century; its last owner was I. I. Zimin, the older brother of S. I. Zimin, owner of the Moscow private opera. The New Martyrs of Butovo are also listed in the OCA calendar on 9 May (new style; 22 May on the old calendar).