Olga Evdokimova

Holy New Martyr Olga Evdokimova was born on 11 July 1896 in the village of Novorozhdestvenka, in the Moscow region, and died on 10 February 1938 in a camp. She defended the church of her village against closure, was arrested and died in the camp. The Orthodox Church calls her a martyr, and her commemoration is on 28 January. Our sources do not show when she was numbered among the saints. She should not be confused with the contemporary martyr Olga Semyonovna Kosheleva.

Her father was a forest ranger on the estate of the wealthy landowner Ilyin. The source says that she married in 1905, at the age of eight or nine, which does not agree with the year of her birth. She obtained a diploma from the communal school. Her husband became a worker in a factory, then a guard, and they had two children. In 1921 her husband died and she was left a widow. She became involved in her parish, Saint John the Baptist in Novorozhdestvenka, which had been her parish since childhood.

On 4 September 1937 Olga Evdokimova was arrested by the political police together with the priests, the psalmist and the church watchman. She was taken to the Taganka prison in Moscow and interrogated the same day. At the interrogation she is said to have stated that she had consciously chosen to oppose the atheist Soviet authorities because of their decision to close her church. She was specifically accused of hiding the church keys so that the authorities would not seize the building.

On 17 October 1937 the political police sentenced her to ten years of forced labour in a re-⁠education camp, and she was deported there. Olga Evdokimova died in the camp about four months later, on 10 February 1938. She was buried in an unknown grave.