Nicholas of Amasia

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas of Amasia was a priest and dean at Pugachev, condemned to exile in Kazakhstan and dead in detention on 26 December 1938.

His life

He was born in 1889 in the village of Savelyevka, in the Nikolaevsk district of the Samara province, in the family of a deacon, Nicholas Vasilievich Amasiysky. As a boy he was expelled from the theological school at Nikolaevsk for indiscipline, then finished the school at Volsk. In 1904 he entered the seminary at Samara but was excluded in 1905 for taking part in student unrest. He served the Church first as a reader, from 1908, in the village of Semenovka, marrying in the same year Olga Ivanovna Akhmatova, the daughter of a priest, who later became a village teacher; they had four children: Nina, Vera, Sergei and Alexander. In 1914 he was ordained deacon, in 1917 priest, serving at Pugachev, then at the Kazan church in the village of Smorodinka, and from 1922 again at Pugachev, where he became dean. The page says he regarded his work as the "lawful defence of the churches", helping rural communities with the registration of their houses of worship.

Arrest and exile

At the beginning of September 1934 several priests and three laymen were arrested for "taking part in a counter-⁠revolutionary group". On 1 October Father Nicholas was arrested too, charged that, having received from a member of the group a proposal to work together against the authorities, he had not informed them. The records of the five interrogations show an admission of guilt, but on 2 January 1935 he protested that the investigator had recorded them wrongly, declaring that he and the clergy had been loyal to the authorities in the spirit of Metropolitan Sergius's declaration. The accusations were so flimsy that the investigation had to change the article. By a decision of 17 March 1935 he was sentenced to three years of exile in Kazakhstan.

He was sent to the Moika mine, near the village of Semiyarka, where refractory clay was dug, in the settlement of Maiskoye in the Pavlodar region. His wife Olga followed him with their youngest son, Alexander. Other clergy were exiled in the mine, among them the archimandrite Gennadius (Rebeza). Father Nicholas worked there as a groom, through the hardest winters. He asked the political Red Cross for early release, but the request went unanswered. He served the whole term but, in place of freedom, was arrested again on 25 November 1937, together with eleven other exiled priests. On 1 December 1937 an NKVD troika of the East Kazakhstan region sentenced them to ten years in a camp. Father Nicholas died in detention on 26 December 1938. His family never learned where he died or was buried; the burial place of the other martyrs of Maiskoye is also unknown.

His granddaughter tells that after the arrest the priest's children could not find work, and her mother and father left for Central Asia. The wife later received a pension from the Saratov diocese, through the care of a priest who had known Father Nicholas. He was rehabilitated in 1988 and 1956, and on 20 August 2000, at the close of the Jubilee Council of Bishops, he was numbered among the new martyrs and confessors of Russia. His granddaughter, who sings in the choir and reads at the Kazan church in Petrovsk, says that, afraid to read at the choir, she saw her grandfather in a dream giving her a book, and later recognised the book from her dream in the Horologion, and her fear passed.

He is remembered on 26 December, on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, and on 12 September (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Saratov, in the new style.