Peter of Kazan

Holy Martyr Peter of Kazan suffered together with the martyr Stephen at the hands of the Kazan Tatars, because he had passed from Islam to Christianity. After the Russian troops left, his relatives took him home by force and called him by his old Muslim name, hoping that he would renounce Christ. To all their caresses and pleas, Saint Peter answered: My father and mother are the God glorified in Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If you believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, you are my kin too. At Holy Baptism I was given the name Peter, not the one by which you call me.

Seeing him unmoved in faith, the family handed him over to torment, in which until death, amid cruel sufferings, he did not cease to confess the Name of Christ, crying: I am a Christian. The martyr was buried in Kazan, on the site where there had been an ancient church of the Resurrection of Christ, at the Grain Market.

He is commemorated on 6 April and on 17 October in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kazan, in the new style.