Peter Yurkov

Holy Hieromartyr Peter Yurkov, a priest, was born on 24 June 1880 in the village of Vyshegorod in the Vereya district of Moscow province, in the family of the peasant Alexei Yurkov. He finished the village school, married and worked a peasant farm. In 1915, in the midst of the war, he was mobilized and served until 1917 as a senior non-⁠commissioned officer. After demobilization he settled in Moscow and worked as an accountant at a factory, but the main thing for him was singing in the church choir, in which several of his factory colleagues also took part. In 1926 he was ordained deacon for the church in Vereya, then priest, and moved to the Dormition church in the village of Simbukhovo. As persecution grew, he left the older children in Vyshegorod and stayed with his wife in Simbukhovo.

The warden of the church was Simeon Turkin, born on 1 February 1870 in Simbukhovo, in the family of the peasant Jacob Turkin. He finished the village school, served in the army between 1894 and 1897, was for a time a policeman and then volost elder. In 1918 he witnessed the uprising of the peasants of the Vereya district and tried to persuade them to disperse, but no one listened; on the way back he was arrested by a detachment of Latvians and taken to Vereya, then released after interrogation. In the twenties he organized a building cooperative. From 1933 he was warden of the Dormition church in Simbukhovo.

The priest Peter Yurkov and the warden Simeon Turkin were arrested on 8 September 1937 and held in Mozhaysk. The on-⁠duty witnesses said that both were carrying on anti-⁠Soviet activity and sought everywhere to win followers, that the warden started religious conversations with the collective farmers in the village tea-⁠room, threatened with punishment those who do not go to church and claimed that under the new constitution the Church had gained great rights and no one could touch it. They said also that Simeon told the builders that Soviet power was not durable, and that the priest on feasts called the collective farmers to return to faith. Father Peter, interrogated, said that he had never carried on counter-⁠revolutionary activity and that with the warden he had only business ties, and about the other charges he could not recall. Simeon admitted that he had discussed the constitution in the tea-⁠room, but said he had replied: now you will not close the church, since freedom has been given and the Church separated from the state. He categorically denied having spoken against the authorities.

On 22 September 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced the priest and the warden to death. They were shot the next day, 23 September 1937, and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo range. Saint Peter is commemorated on 23 September, on 29 May (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.