Nicholas Lyubomudrov

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Lyubomudrov was a priest in the village of Latskoye, Yaroslavl province. He was born in 1862 in the village of Yurkino and was shot in 1918. The Council of Bishops of the Russian Church of 20 August 2000 numbered him among the holy hieromartyrs, for veneration throughout the Church. The exact day of his death is missing in our record.

He was born in the village of Yurkino, in the Poshekhonye district, into the family of a psalm-⁠reader. He finished the theological school at Poshekhonye and the Yaroslavl seminary. In 1887 he was sent to serve in the village of Latskoye, where he lived for almost thirty-⁠two years. He was a true spiritual shepherd to his parishioners, and all his life there was filled with service to his flock. He taught religion in a three-⁠class zemstvo school, set up in the village the first library and reading room in the area, in which he gathered spiritual and moral books, Russian classics, books for children, newspapers and magazines. He organized a harmonious church choir, in which all his children also sang. Father Nicholas was well known and valued by the archbishop of Yaroslavl and Rostov Tikhon, the future Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.

In 1918 he was shot by a detachment of Latvian riflemen, on the denunciation of members of the committees of poor peasants. The peasants close to him advised him to hide for a time and offered him shelter: "Father, go into any house and you will be safe." But Father Nicholas, not considering himself guilty of anything before the authorities, and unwilling to leave his flock and by his flight give cause for suspicion, answered that he had committed no crime and feared nothing.

To the request to bury him according to Christian custom on the third day, the district executive committee replied with an order to bury him at once and without any rites. One of the peasants gave a ready-⁠made coffin, in which Father Nicholas was laid. Sophia Petrovna clothed him in a cassock, epitrachelion and skufia and put into his hands a wooden cross from Athos. Despite the prohibitions, many parishioners who honoured him came to take leave of him.

His wife, Sophia Petrovna Lyubomudrova (born Diakonova, 1862 to 1951), from a priest's family, also suffered for the faith: in 1919 she was arrested for "agitation against Soviet power" and spent two months in prison in Yaroslavl, until the charge was dropped for lack of evidence. They had four sons and four daughters. Their grandson, Mark Nikolaevich Lyubomudrov, became a publicist, theatre scholar and professor, and their great-⁠grandson, Alexei Markovich Lyubomudrov, a doctor of philology and writer.