Nikon Kogutovsky

Holy New Martyr Nikon Kogutovsky was a priest and was shot at Uman on 1 November 1937. He was born on 5 April 1875 in the village of Yanishivka, Stavyshche district, Kyiv province, in a psalm-⁠reader's family. He studied at the Uman theological school and the Odessa seminary, finishing in 1900. His brothers Andrew and George also became priests.

From 1901 to 1920 he was parish priest of the church of the Protection of the Mother of God at Nechaivka, Kherson province, where he was the first teacher of the future writer Yuri Yanovsky at the parish school and became known for his sermons on faith, conscience and piety. In 1909-1910 he also served in the church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus in Oleksandrivka. In 1920 the Nechaivka church was closed; after some years the NKVD sent him to Uman as "politically unreliable".

In 1937 four priests exiled from different parts of Ukraine, Damian Buchinsky, Nikita Hanzha, Diomedes Kryzhanovsky and Nikon Kogutovsky, were tried in the same case and shot in the Uman prison. They had been arrested on 10 October, at a gathering of believers and clergy on the edge of the town where the return of the church of the Holy Trinity, closed three years before, was being demanded. On 15 October the usual charge was laid, that they held illegal services and anti-⁠Soviet agitation, and all four declared themselves priests "of the Old Slavonic orientation". The Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church canonized him on 28 October 1997.