Nicholas Karasyov

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Karasyov was a priest in the Ryazan province and was condemned to death in December 1937, after, at the inquiry, he tore up the records with false testimonies.

He was born on 23 April 1901 in the village of Gusevsky Pogost in the Kasimov district of the Ryazan province, in the family of the peasant carpenter Nikita Nikolaevich Karasyov and Ekaterina Vasilievna. He finished the teachers' school. Before the revolution he was an employee and, beside his daily work, served at the local church as a singer and reader. In the 1920s he was ordained deacon for the village church of the Transfiguration and for a long time, despite the growing persecution, fulfilled his church obedience. In 1935 he was arrested for the first time by the NKVD on suspicion of setting fire to a forest, but after a month he was released for lack of evidence. In 1937 he had with his wife Maria three children: Basil, aged nine, and Nina and Alexandra, aged fourteen and ten. Their household was a house with outbuildings and one cow.

He was ordained priest shortly before the arrest, which came on 27 September 1937. He was charged with "taking part in a counter-⁠revolutionary insurrectionary and terrorist organisation". The interrogations ran from September to December. They tried to force him to accept false accusations, but he rejected them all calmly, and to the mockery of the investigators he replied like a fool for Christ. At the interrogation of 25 November, asked about the counter-⁠revolutionary activity of the priest Dinariev, he answered with unrelated things, about visits and a pig slaughtered in secret. At the last interrogation, on 1 December 1937, when he was to sign the records with his alleged testimonies, he took them and tore them into small pieces; of this there is in the file an act signed by three NKVD workers. The file was sent to the NKVD troika of the Ryazan region, which on 6 December 1937 sentenced him to death, together with a group of innocent priests and laymen.

He is remembered on 23 December, on 23 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Ryazan, and on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, in the new style.