Paul of Mokino

Holy Hieromartyr Paul of Mokino (Anoshkin), a priest, was born on 5 February 1891 in the family of the townsman Pavel Anoshkin. He finished the Perm Theological Seminary in 1912, and on 19 August 1912 was ordained priest for the Intercession church in Verkh-⁠Sarsy, in the Krasnoufimsk district of Perm province. He was head and religion teacher of the parish school there and taught religion at other schools in the area, and was chairman of the parish trusteeship and of the temperance society. On 25 or 26 March 1913 he received the hip-⁠cloth for outstanding pastoral zeal and was moved to the church of Saint Nicholas in the village of Mokino, in the Okhansk district, where he headed the parish school, taught the Law of God in several schools and, from 1914, at the two-⁠class school in Mokino.

On 29 December 1918 soldiers of the Red Army, of the 29th Rifle Division, Putilov regiment, occupied the village of Mokino. Several burst into the church, where the priest Paul Anoshkin and the deacon Grigory Smirnov were. The two servants of the altar were dragged out of the church by the hair, beaten, driven into the street in their underclothes and led through the village, barefoot in the snow. Then they were tied by the hair with ropes to the tails of horses and dragged along the road, before the villagers, to Shirokiy Log, a kilometre from the village. There they tried to cut off Father Paul's head, but missed and split his skull; then they shot them and stabbed them with bayonets. The bodies, already dead, were dragged to the river Berezovka and left there.

The faithful of the church of Saint Nicholas buried the two servants in the church enclosure. In August 2000 the Council of Bishops numbered him among the New Martyrs of Russia. Because the day of death was not known, his commemoration had been set on 7 June; it was later moved, and on 20 April 2019, on the basis of more exact data, Patriarch Kirill set it on 29 December. The grave had been forgotten; after two years of searching it was found in 2016 behind the altar of the destroyed church. On 29 September 2016 the remains of two men were taken up, one in green priestly vestments and the other in green diaconal vestments, with marks of violent death; the remains were almost intact. After identification by forensic experts, on 11 February 2018 the official ceremony of opening the relics took place in the Ascension church in Perm. The reliquary with the relics of the priest Paul and the deacon Grigory remained in that church.

Saint Paul is commemorated on 29 December (new style; 16 December, old style), on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 14 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Perm Metropolis.