Peter Tupitsyn

Holy Venerable Martyr Peter Tupitsyn, a novice, was born in 1906 into a good peasant family and is venerated as a local saint of the Kazan diocese. He was killed in 1930, at the age of twenty-⁠four, in the persecution of the monks of Raifa.

After finishing the village school, while still very young and deeply devout, he set out to wander among the holy places, looking for a quiet monastery where he could live in monastic solitude. Almost everywhere he found monasteries closed, ruined or threatened with closure. He also came to Sarov and heard there that near Kazan stood the Raifa Hermitage, still open and supported by the peasants of the surrounding villages. He entered it as a novice and stayed until it was closed in June 1928.

After the closure he lived mostly in the village of Belo-⁠Bezvodnaya, close to Raifa, making pilgrimages of a day or two and preparing for monastic vows. From there he went to Kazan, and then spent a year and a half in the village of Churilino, earning his bread by various labours or by alms. At the beginning of the Philip fast of 1929 he returned to Belo-⁠Bezvodnaya and often visited the former monastery.

In January 1930 he was arrested, either on 23 January in Belo-⁠Bezvodnaya or on 27 January at Raifa, after the service in the hermitage church on the patronal feast of the Venerable Fathers slain at Sinai and Raithu. He was tried in the group case known as the case of the Raifa monks. His open confession astonished even the investigators. In brief, he declared that he was a believer, ready to suffer for a faith that was being persecuted, that the persecution had been foretold in Scripture, and that still harder times would come, which Christians must meet with joy.

On 20 February 1930 an OGPU troika of the Tatar Republic sentenced him to death. He was shot on 7 April 1930, the Annunciation (new style), together with the other martyrs of Raifa. In 1996 he was numbered among the locally venerated saints of the Kazan diocese.

He is commemorated on 27 January, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 17 October in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kazan, in the new style.