Nicholas Ponomarev

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Ponomarev was a deacon in the village of Shogryshskoye, in the Irbit district, and was killed by the Bolsheviks in the summer of 1918.

He was born in 1867. After the people's school, in 1885 he was named reader and served at the church of Saint Nicholas in the village of Osintsevo, Irbit district. On 18 September 1902 he was moved to the church of Saint Nicholas in the village of Shogryshskoye, in the same district, where he spent the rest of his life. The village was mentioned in documents from the first half of the seventeenth century, as Sogryshskaya village, from the word "sogra", swamp, being surrounded by peat bogs. The stone church of Saint Nicholas, with side chapels of the Kazan Icon and of the Holy Martyrs Florus and Laurus, had been built with the money of the parishioners in the first third of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century the village, with those around it, had about four thousand inhabitants, among whom there was no schismatic or sectarian, which was rare in the Urals. The people farmed, cut wood, made charcoal and dug peat.

Village life flowed quietly for the reader Nicholas Ponomarev. In August 1916 he was found worthy to be ordained deacon and stayed in the same place, Shogryshskoye; he was then almost fifty. His ministry did not last long: two years later, in 1918, he received a martyr's death from the hands of the Bolsheviks.

Soviet power was established in the Irbit district at the beginning of February 1918, and the volost and village soviets began to act with hostility toward the church's servants; arrests followed. In the summer of 1918 the Urals came into the zone of fighting, and in the Irbit district a state of war was introduced. The front was approaching Shogryshskoye, a few kilometres from Egorshino; around the village the Red terror intensified: at Egorshino Father Constantine Slovtsov had been cruelly killed, at Kopteloskoye Father Nicholas Udintsev, at Pokrovskoye Father Plato Gornykh with two parishioners, and the priest of Sarafannoye, Florentius Troitsky, had been arrested twice.

The same fate befell the deacon Nicholas Ponomarev. On 28 July (10 August) 1918, on the feast of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God, he was sent to public labour at Egorshino station and was soon killed by the Bolsheviks. The exact date and place of death are not known, but it may be supposed that it took place either in the village or at the station, between 28 July (10 August) and the arrival of the White troops on 8 (21) September. The Whites found a sad sight in the village: the church of Saint Nicholas had been ravaged, the boxes broken, the money and carpet taken, the priest's dwelling plundered, and a Red soldier used the silver pyx taken from it to keep tobacco. At the end of 1918 or the beginning of 1919 his name was entered in the list of clergy of the Yekaterinburg diocese killed in 1918, drawn up so that they might be commemorated in all churches and monasteries of the diocese. In 2002 he was glorified in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia of the Yekaterinburg diocese.

He is remembered on 10 August, on 11 February in the Synaxis of the Saints of Yekaterinburg, and on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, in the new style.