Peter Pankov

Holy Martyr Peter Pankov was the younger son of the priest John Pankov and was killed in 1918 together with his father and his elder brother. The Azbyka page tells above all the life of Father John.

Holy Hieromartyr John was born in 1873 in the family of the psalmist Lev Pankov. From 1900 he was a teacher at the boys' school in Livny, in Oryol province. He was ordained priest and from 1915 served at the Holy Trinity church in the village of Ust-⁠Nugr, Krivtsovo volost, Bolkhov district, and was religion teacher at the primary schools of Kurasovo and Tolkachevo. Half a verst from the church there was a water mill of Optina Monastery. When the atheists took power, the mill was requisitioned by the volost committee and put in the care of a soldier, Tikhon Kutuzov, brother of the commissar of justice of Bolkhov. By his blasphemous behaviour and his persecution of the priest, Kutuzov showed from the start his hostility to the Church; he seemed ready to kill him, so Father John asked the peasants to defend him.

On Great Saturday 1918 Kutuzov, drunk and armed, visited the psalmist and the teacher, then set out for the priest's house. Father John, seeing him armed, ordered the alarm bells rung, but it turned out that Tikhon had come drunk to ask forgiveness before Pascha. On the first day of Pascha, 22 April, the peasants, angry at the seizure of the mill, came to drive him out, and if he resisted, to arrest him. Kutuzov refused to go and fired several times into the crowd, killing two peasants and wounding one. The furious crowd rushed him and killed him.

In the morning of 26 April a punitive detachment of seven to ten Red soldiers arrived in the village. Father John was accused of inciting rebellion, was stabbed with bayonets and shot. With him were killed his sons, Nikolai, an officer, the elder, and Peter, the younger, a second-⁠year student at the Oryol seminary. The bodies lay unburied for a week, then were buried not far from the church. The priest's house was plundered, and the Reds profaned the tabernacle of the church.

Saint Peter is commemorated on 9 May and on 8 September, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Oryol Metropolis, in the new style.