Sergius Kedrov

Holy Hieromartyr Sergius Kedrov was an archpriest and dean in the village of Faustovo near Moscow, and he was shot at Butovo on 16 November 1937.

The priest of Faustovo He was born on 10 August 1880 in the village of Konstantinovo, Bronnitsy district, in the family of the priest Paul Kedrov. He graduated from the Moscow Seminary in 1901 and was a teacher until 1908 at the parish school of Starniki. On 5 October 1908 he married Lyudmila Alexandrovna, daughter of Father Alexander Grigorievich Zverev, rector of the church of the Holy Trinity in Faustovo. On 17 October he was ordained deacon and on the 19th, by Bishop Tryphon (Turkestanov) of Dmitrov, priest for the same church. The church, known since the seventeenth century, had been built through the care of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich. The parish numbered 248 houses and about 1,600 parishioners, in Faustovo and in the village of Yurasovo, three versts away.

In more than twenty years of service he became a father to the village, and people called him Sergius of Faustovo. On feasts he went with the molieben to every house, and in the homes of the poor he left alms in secret. Once, in a house of orphans, he slipped money under a saucer and told the psalm-⁠reader not to be offended, for it was his own money. He formed a choir with the children, which remained faithful to him even in the time of persecution. In 1922 he was arrested for resisting the seizure of church valuables and sentenced to five years in a camp, but in 1923 an amnesty freed him after a year and a half and he returned to his church. In the twenties he fell ill with typhus and the doctor said there was no hope. His wife vowed to God that for a time she would walk on Sundays twenty-⁠five kilometres to a church with the wonderworking icon of the Jerusalem Mother of God; the priest recovered, kept, as the parish remembered it, for the crown of martyrdom. At Pascha 1929 he was raised to archpriest, the first priest of that rank in the history of the church in Faustovo, and named dean of the sixth district of Bronnitsy. He was a zealous preacher and at every service gave a clear and simple instruction.

Martyrdom He was arrested on 25 October 1937, at two in the morning, in the night of the feast of the Jerusalem icon of the Mother of God, after he had served the vigil. The chairman of the village council and a militiaman knocked at the door, and he asked them to wait while he prayed. The men of authority did not enter the house or search it but waited for him; he prayed long, received communion, and came out. The next day the faithful learned that the church was closed and the priest arrested. Imprisoned at Kolomna, he rejected every accusation at his interrogation. Villagers were called as witnesses; a woman who had been in church only once in 1937 and another who spoke of the collective farms were the only evidence gathered. On 15 November an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 16 November 1937 Archpriest Sergius was shot and buried in an unknown common grave at Butovo.

He is commemorated on 16 November and, in the new style, 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.