Nicholas Romanovsky

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Romanovsky was an archpriest in Nikolaev, on the Black Sea, and was shot in a camp in Kazakhstan on 20 November 1937.

He was born in 1869 in Nikolaev, in the Kherson province, of a hereditary priestly line. He attended the Odessa seminary, finishing in 1890, and in the same year was ordained priest for the church in the village of Kaspiro-⁠Nikolaevka, where he founded a parish school. In 1895 he was moved to Nikolaev and assigned to the Novokupecheskaya church, as third priest. From 1907 he was a cleric of the Greek church of Saint Nicholas in Nikolaev and combined his ministry with teaching religion at the first Mariinsky girls' gymnasium, until its closing, in 1918. In the First World War he organised, with the gifts of the parishioners, a hospital for the wounded in Nikolaev.

In 1931 he was arrested, and on 15 August he was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp, after which he was sent to Karlag, in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan. After six years he was arrested again in the camp. He was charged that, "serving his sentence in Karlag, N. A. Romanovsky, as part of a group of former priests, took part in organising the 'True Orthodox Church', a current which recognised neither Soviet power nor the church administration in the USSR", and that one of the group's aims was to draw to its side the Renovationists among the imprisoned believers and clergy. At the interrogations the archpriest Nicholas "did not agree with the accusations, did not admit guilt, though he did not deny taking part in the meetings of former priests". On 20 November 1937 he was sentenced to death, and the sentence was carried out.

He is remembered on 20 November and on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, in the new style.