Nicholas Zapolsky

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Zapolsky was a deacon in the village of Bolshiye Vyazemy, near Moscow, and was shot at Butovo on 27 June 1938.

He was born in 1889 in the village of Sivkovo in the Mozhaisk district, in the family of the priest Alexander Zapolsky, who served at the church of the Transfiguration in the village. In 1907 he finished the theological school and in 1910 became reader at the church of the Sign in the village of Lisintsevo, Vereya district. Then he married Maria, daughter of a priest, and they had six children. In 1920 he was ordained deacon for the same church, and in 1925 he was moved to the church of the Transfiguration in the village of Bolshiye Vyazemy, Zvenigorod district. In 1929 he was accused of illegal logging and sentenced by the court to two years of exile, but the sentence was changed to a fine of three hundred roubles. In 1930 he was arrested for failing to deliver wood procurements and sentenced to six months of forced labour.

In 1937 mass arrests began. In February 1938 the investigators questioned witnesses on duty, who signed false testimonies, and on their basis the deacon was arrested on 21 March 1938. The interrogations lasted a month and a half; at the last, on 8 May, the investigator told him he was charged with slandering Soviet power. He answered: "I do not admit guilt." At a confrontation with false witnesses, one said that the deacon had said that "Soviet power has arrested all the priests, but its end is near; the Pope will come from Italy and drive the communists into hell". A woman said that he had answered her request to take ashes for fertiliser with mocking words about the grain plan, and that soon there would be a tsar and the communists would be hanged. Deacon Nicholas rejected it resolutely: "I held no anti-⁠Soviet conversation, he is lying." He said that in February 1938 he had not met the woman in church and had said nothing to her, and that she had never been in church. On 2 June an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 27 June 1938 the deacon Nicholas Zapolsky was shot and buried in an unknown common grave on the Butovo range.

In 1939 all the NKVD workers of Zvenigorod were arrested and sentenced by the Military Tribunal of the NKVD troops to various terms for falsifying investigative files. The file of the deacon Nicholas Zapolsky was attached as proof of such falsification. The troika's decisions were re-⁠examined, but the deacon's file was not reviewed, "taking into account the social face of the convicted man", that is, the fact that he was a servant of Christ.

He is remembered on 27 June, on 29 May (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, and on 5 September (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.