Sergius Borodavkin

Holy Martyr Sergius Borodavkin was a merchant and then church warden in Krasny Kholm, in Tver province, and was shot on 8 March 1938.

Sergius Matveevich Borodavkin was born on 29 December 1878 in Krasny Kholm. He finished the town school, was a merchant of the first guild and an honorary citizen of the town. Before the revolution he traded in textiles and groceries and collected eggs for export; in season as many as thirty wagons were gathered. He had shops in Saint Petersburg and in Krasny Kholm and a hundred desyatinas of land. Soon after the Bolshevik coup all his property was confiscated. In 1930 he was arrested and sentenced to two years of exile, and after serving it he returned to his native town and became church warden.

On 16 February 1938, during a new wave of arrests, he was arrested and questioned the same day. He named his sister, Antonina Matveevna Komendantova, in Krasny Kholm, and his brother Basil in Yaroslavl, with whom he had no correspondence, and he denied the charge of anti-⁠Soviet agitation. On 6 March an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 8 March 1938 he was shot and buried in an unknown common grave.

He is commemorated, in the new style, on 8 March (a movable date), on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 18 July (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver.