Nicholas Pankov

Holy Martyr Nicholas Pankov was the eldest son of the priest John Pankov and an officer; he was killed together with his father and his brother by a punitive band of Reds, in April 1918, in the village of Ust-⁠Nugr, in the Oryol province.

The Azbyka page holds the life of the Holy Hieromartyr John Pankov, born in 1873 in the family of the psalm-⁠reader Leo Pankov, from 1900 a teacher at the boys' school in Livny, then priest and, from 1915, servant of the church of the Holy Trinity in the village of Ust-⁠Nugr, in the Krivtsovo volost, Bolkhov district, and teacher of religion at two primary schools.

Half a verst from the church stood a water mill of the Optina Hermitage. When the Bolsheviks came to power, the mill was requisitioned by the volost committee, and its management was given to the soldier Tikhon Kutuzov, brother of the commissar of justice at Bolkhov. By his blasphemous conduct and his harassment of Father John, Kutuzov showed at once his hostility to the church, so Father John, fearing he might be killed, asked the peasants to defend him. On Holy Saturday of 1918 Kutuzov, drunk and armed, visited the reader and the teacher, then went toward the priest's house; Father John ordered the alarm bell rung, but it turned out that Tikhon had come before Pascha to ask forgiveness for his conduct. On the first day of Pascha, 22 April, the peasants, resentful that the mill had been taken, went to the mill to evict Kutuzov and, if he resisted, to arrest him. He fired several times into the crowd with his rifle, killing two peasants and wounding one, and the furious crowd killed him.

On the morning of 26 April a punitive band of seven to ten Red soldiers came into the village. Father John was accused of inciting revolt, pierced with bayonets and shot. With him were killed his sons: Nicholas, the elder, an officer, and Peter, the younger, a second-⁠year student at the Oryol seminary. The bodies of the priest and his sons lay a week unburied, then were buried not far from the church in Ust-⁠Nugr. The priest's property was plundered, and over the church tabernacle the soldiers committed an outrage.

He is remembered on 9 May, on 8 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Oryol Metropolis, and on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, in the new style.