Nicholas Pongilsky

Holy Confessor Nicholas Pongilsky was a priest in the Yaroslavl region and died in a camp in the year 1942, after two sentences, the second for a joke.

He was born in 1879 in the family of a church servant of the Yaroslavl province. After the Yaroslavl seminary he received the priesthood and served as a regimental priest in the Russian army. The revolution found him as dean of the city of Rybinsk. There he was arrested in September 1929. At the arrest his correspondence with Bishop Veniamin (Voskresensky) of Rybinsk was confiscated, for he had supported the bishop in exile by sending him money. The Special Council of the OGPU sentenced him, among many other priests in the group case of the clergy of the Ivanovo region, to five years, which he served in camps in Siberia.

Released after five years, he received a place of service in the village of Bolshoye Titovskoye, at the church of the Nativity of Christ on the edge of the village. Having nothing, he lived in the house of an old woman of the parish who lived alone. In the same house two Komsomol collective-⁠farm girls, sent to the building of the Yaroslavl-⁠Rybinsk road, were temporarily lodged. In a conversation with them Father Nicholas incautiously said something as a joke and mentioned the name of Trotsky. The next day he was called to the village soviet and warned not to speak so. It might have ended there, but the soviet's representative reported to the NKVD district office at Tutaev, and in 1940 the priest was arrested again. This time he received ten years. He was charged with "praising the old tsarist order and the counter-⁠revolutionaries, slandering the leaders of the party and the government, agitation against the measures of Soviet power". Admitting that the joke and the mention of Trotsky had been unfortunate and out of place, he rejected the charge of counter-⁠revolutionary activity. In 1941 he wrote a complaint, pointing to the severity of the sentence, given for a single conversation "of a jesting family character"; the complaint went unanswered. A year later, the confessor Nicholas Pongilsky died in the camp.

He is remembered on 6 August, on 5 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, and on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, in the new style.