Paul Favoritov

Holy Hieromartyr Paul Favoritov, a priest, was born on 14 December 1883 in the village of Osenevo near Uglich, in Yaroslavl province, in the family of the priest John Kapitonovich Favoritov and Sofia. He was an only child, and his father died early, so Paul and his mother moved to his grandfather's house in Uglich. He finished the spiritual school in Uglich, then the Yaroslavl Seminary in 1905, with good results, and in 1910 the Moscow Theological Academy. On 15 October 1910 he married Nadezhda Fedorovna Genzberg. In 1910 he was appointed assistant inspector at the seminary in Krasnoyarsk, where he worked until 1915. His sons Sergei (1911) and Innokenty (1914) were born.

He lived through the revolution in Solikamsk, where he taught and was assistant warden at the theological school. On 28 September 1918 he was appointed priest at the Saviour church in Solikamsk, and in February 1919 rector, because the priest and deacon of the church had been killed by the Bolsheviks. In 1915 he had received the Order of Saint Stanislaus, in 1917 the hip-⁠cloth and the skufia. In 1918 he had his wife and three children, among them a baby girl of one month.

His first arrest took place in February 1930 in the village of Priluki, in connection with the raising of taxes on priests and churches. The Nativity of Christ church at Priluki was closed in 1930. The priest moved to the Kalyazin district and served at the Dormition church in the village of Konstantinovo, living in Kalyazin. In 1936 he was tried at Kalyazin and fined 250 roubles. He served there together with the priest Ilya Ivanovich Cheredeev (1878-1937), with whom he received the martyr's end.

On 21 December 1937 he was arrested on a charge of anti-⁠Soviet agitation and taken to Kashin prison. The search found nothing incriminating, and his belongings, an album of portraits of hierarchs, church books and letters, were burned. He did not admit guilt, but the statements of villagers were enough. Father Paul was fifty-⁠four and Father Ilya fifty-⁠nine, and the road from Kalyazin to Kashin, on foot, in December, meant at least twenty kilometres. On 27 December the NKVD troika of the Kalinin region sentenced him to death. He was shot on 29 December 1937, at one in the morning.

He is commemorated on 29 December, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 18 July (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver, in the new style.