Procopius Popov

Holy Hieromartyr Procopius Popov, an archpriest, was rector of the Holy Trinity church in the village of Sholga, Vologda province, and was shot in public, in a field, on 13 October 1918, in the time of the Red Terror.

He was born in 1864 in the village of Utmanovo, the son of the priest Michael Alexandrovich Popov. He graduated from the theological school in Nikolsk and, in 1884, from the Vologda Seminary, in the same class as the future theologian Nicholas Nikanorovich Glubokovsky. He was appointed supervisor at the theological school of Vologda and married Alexandra Alexeevna Loseva; they had four children: Sophia, Nicholas, Maria and Peter. In December 1885 he was ordained priest for the Holy Trinity church in Sholga. In 1905 he was left a widower. The church had a large parish, ninety villages, and the district assemblies were held in it; in 1890 he opened there the first library in Sholga, and Father Procopius was its first librarian. From 1901 to 1917 he was dean of the fifth district of the Nikolsk county. He was also teacher of religion in schools, deputy for school affairs and trustee of a zemstvo school, and received many church awards, among them the golden pectoral cross, and on 6 August 1917 the rank of archpriest; for twenty-⁠five years as a teacher of religion he received the Order of St Anna, third class.

He had long foreseen the horrors that would come upon Russia. Once, showing the churchwarden tsarist money, he told him that a time would come when this money would be pasted on the walls and nobody would need it; the churchwarden was angry, but the words proved true. On 27 April 1918 the third peasants' congress imposed on him a contribution of seven thousand rubles, as on a representative of the exploiting class. On 13 October 1918, on the eve of the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God, a punitive detachment came to Sholga and arrested Father Procopius on suspicion of counter-⁠revolution. A pit was dug in the middle of a field, and many people from the village were gathered; according to some sources the father himself was forced to dig the grave. The killers, sure of their power, carried out the crime in sight of all.

Father Procopius stood before the pit, prayed, took leave of his parishioners, bowed to the ground and asked them to forgive a sinner. The parishioners wept. He took off his outer cassock and gave it to his sons, who stood beside him, remained in his inner cassock, turned his face to the east, prayed again and said that he was ready. A shot rang out; the father fell, and a second shot killed him. In the same year Fr Avtonom Golovkov and Fyodor Sokolov, the son of a psalmist, were shot at Sholga.

At first he was buried in the field, but his sons asked that his body be moved to the cemetery; the authorities long refused, and finally gave leave for him to be buried in the cemetery of the village of Koskovo, although the exact place remains uncertain. He was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000. He is commemorated on 13 October, on 21 October in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vyatka and on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, in the new style.