Porphyry Felonin

Holy Hieromartyr Porphyry Felonin, a priest, served in Siberia, in the diocese of Yenisei, and was condemned to death by Red partisans in the autumn of 1919, after having been named for a short time administrator of a neighbouring parish. The exact date of his death is not known.

He was born in 1858 in the family of the priest Nicholas Ilyich Felonin (†1890) of the village of Nizhny Belomut, Zaraisk district. In 1874 he graduated from the Zaraisk Theological School in the first class and entered the Ryazan Seminary, from which he was discharged at his own request in 1879. In 1880 he was appointed, at his own request, psalmist at the church of St Nicholas in the village of Gorki, Yegoryevsk district, and in 1881 he was ordained deacon; from 1885 he held the deacon's post of the same parish.

On 11 July 1899 Bishop Meletius of Ryazan ordained him priest for the church of St Nicholas in the village of Bunbuisky, in the Yenisei diocese. On 6 March 1901 he was transferred, at his request, to the church of St George in the village of Ustyansky, Kansk district, and from 1909 he is mentioned as priest of the Holy Trinity church in Troitsko-⁠Zavodskoe, the salt-⁠works village, in the Kansk district.

From 16 December 1918 the north-⁠east of the Kansk district was seized by an uprising of Red partisans, entrenched in the village of Taseevo. The peasants testified to their cruelty: roving bands robbed, killed and set fires, and those they caught they whipped and tortured. On 26 March 1919 the priest Stephen Sukhovsky of the village of Rozhdestvenskoe reported, on rumours still unverified, that Father Porphyry had been killed. A dean's report of 27 June 1919, however, shows that Father Porphyry was still alive until the Bolsheviks fled from the government troops in early summer, and an August issue of the Yenisei Diocesan Gazette reported that he had been named temporary administrator of the Rozhdestvenskoe parish.

In autumn the Bolsheviks, driven by the government troops a hundred versts to the east, deep into the taiga, went over to a counter-⁠offensive and retook the lost territories. A former partisan, in his memoirs, says that the military tribunal worked day and night, and that the priest Felonin was sentenced to death on the grounds that he had submitted a large list of persons who in his view should be executed. The exact date of the priest's death is not known.

In August 2000 the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, for veneration throughout the Church. He is commemorated on 11 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Krasnoyarsk Metropolis and on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, in the new style.