Parthenius Gruzinov

Holy Hieromartyr Parthenius Gruzinov, a priest, was born on 30 January 1874 in the village of Ryazantsy in the Bogorodsk district of Moscow province, in the family of the psalmist Vasily Gruzinov, who served thirty years at the Holy Trinity church in the village. His father died when Parthenius was eleven, and his mother, Paraskeva Petrovna, became a prosphora baker at the Pyatnitskaya church of the Trinity-⁠Sergius Lavra. At eight he was sent to the town school. He finished the Perervinsk spiritual school in 1890, the Bethany Seminary in 1896 and the Moscow Theological Academy in 1900.

In 1901 he was sent as a psalmist to a church in Moscow and served as a psalmist in Moscow churches until 1933, when he was ordained priest. In 1935 he was sent to the church of the Archangel Michael in the village of Mikhailovskoe, in the Zvenigorod district.

In the second half of 1937 mass arrests began again, and the NKVD summoned witnesses. One said that the priest gathered believers in his flat or in the field by the forest, and that after each gathering damage appeared at the collective farm: mowers broke on stakes driven into the field, and a tractor fell into a disguised pit. The chairman of the village council claimed that the priest said of the Soviet constitution that it was a sham law, that the religious law was the best, and that in mid-⁠May he urged the collective farmers not to go out to work, spoiling the spring sowing.

On the basis of these statements Father Parthenius was arrested on 15 February 1938, held in Mozhaisk and interrogated the next day. He said that he had served without a break for thirty-⁠seven years in various churches and that he kept ties only with the higher clergy and the dean. He rejected the charge of counter-⁠revolutionary activity and slander against government measures. On 19 February 1938 an NKVD troika sentenced him to death; he was shot on 26 February 1938 and buried in the common grave at the Butovo range.

He is commemorated on 26 February, on 29 May (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow and on 10 December in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Radonezh, in the new style.