Nicholas Sretensky

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Sretensky was a priest at the Annunciation Monastery in Bezhetsk, near Tver, and was shot on 17 September 1937.

He was born on 15 April 1867 in the village of Tolstikovo in the Bezhetsk district of the Tver province, in the family of the priest Alexei Ivanovich Sretensky. At ten his parents sent him to the theological school at Bezhetsk, and then he entered the Tver seminary. After the seminary he was for half a year a teacher at a zemstvo school, then a spiritual supervisor for some months. In 1890, at twenty-⁠three, he was ordained priest for the church of the Annunciation Monastery in Bezhetsk, where he served until the arrest of 1937. From 1906 he was an active member of the Tver Orthodox Missionary Society, from 1910 a member of the charitable society of the Holy Great Martyr Barbara, for helping poor pupils of the Tver diocesan girls' school. In 1915, for twenty years of teaching religion in various schools, he received the Order of Saint Anne, third class. He had two children, a son and a daughter; the son Vladimir, born in 1895, went abroad after the civil war, settled for a time in Poland, then in France, and in Paris finished the institute of physics and mathematics and the mining academy.

Father Nicholas came to be loved and respected by the parishioners. Even despite the persecution of the twenties, in the mid-⁠thirties some fifty nuns still lived near the Bezhetsk monastery. Driven from the monastery buildings, they lived in private houses, but gathered in the church, celebrated the monastic services and kept a monastic way of life. When the authorities tried to close all the churches of the town, the nuns resisted and gathered signatures of believers for a petition not to close the churches.

Father Nicholas was arrested just after the start of the persecution of summer-⁠autumn 1937, on 5 August, and interrogated the same day about details of his life, about his relatives, about the son abroad. The interrogations were daily and ceaseless. He said that he regarded the closing of the Entry church by the authorities as wrong and that he had condemned its priests for allowing it. Of the nuns he said that fifty of them had come to him to complain of a heavy tax on making blankets without a licence and that he had helped them to lodge a complaint. He denied that he had made anti-⁠Soviet speeches at the clergy meetings convened by Bishop Gregory Kozyrev, that he had drawn young people to church or that he had warned the participants to keep secrecy. Of the sermons about demons he explained that he meant the demons of the Gospel. He did not admit guilt of belonging to a counter-⁠revolutionary group of clergy. On 13 September an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 17 September 1937 Father Nicholas Sretensky was shot. In August 2000 the Jubilee Council of Bishops numbered him among the new martyrs and confessors.

He is remembered on 17 September, on 18 July (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver, and on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, in the new style.