Nikephoros Yugov

Holy Venerable Martyr Nikephoros Yugov, in the world Nicholas Ilyich Yugov, was a hermit in the forest near Veliky Ustyug and was shot in 1918 by the Bolsheviks.

He was the nephew and godson of the elder Maxim. His father, Ilya, was a deeply devout man. The elder's ascetic life drew the soul of the young man, who first visited his godfather, then lived with him without interruption for the last four years of the elder's life. It is told that once, as he was reading the monastic rule, someone knocked at the door, and the elder told him not to open until the prayer was finished; afterwards it proved that no one had come and it had been a demonic delusion. In this way he learned to tell the working of the evil ones from real events.

After the elder's death, Nicholas, who had been tonsured in the elder's lifetime with the name Nikephoros, withdrew to a forest hermitage and increased his labours. Many of Elder Maxim's spiritual children came to his cell for counsel. The cell was divided into two rooms: he lived in the rear one and received people in the front one.

In 1918, when the persecution began, the Bolsheviks sent an armed band to arrest him. The cell was full of visitors. Father Nikephoros could have escaped by a secret path into the forest, but he knew that everyone in the house would then be taken hostage, so he gave himself up willingly. At the village of Krasavino, where the band stopped, people came out of their houses, and he blessed the children with the sign of the cross and said to them, "Live with God." He was then taken to the prison in Veliky Ustyug and shot in the same year, among seventeen people arrested then, and buried in an unknown place in the city cemetery.

In August 2000 the Jubilee Council of the Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the new martyrs and confessors. He is remembered on 7 February (a movable day), with the other new martyrs, and on 11 July (a movable day), in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vologda, in the new style.