Sergius of Gortyna

Holy Hieromartyr Sergius of Gortyna, also known as Sergius Gortinsky, was a priest who was shot at Voronezh on 2 August 1930 with a group of clergy and laymen.

The priest

He was born on 10 March 1889 in Ryazan, in the family of the priest Dimitri Gortinsky, and finished the six-⁠class school at Alexandrov in Erivan province. In 1916 he was ordained deacon for the church of the village of Bogoyavlenskoe, Mosalsk district, Kaluga province, and a year later served as deacon in the village of Malkovo in the same province. In 1920 he was ordained priest and served for a time in the village of Tylka in Chernigov province, then, five years later, in the village of Kozinka in Stavropol province. The law separating Church from state was already in force and many peasants registered their marriages at state offices and lived without a church wedding. Father Sergius urged them to be married in church, and warned the obstinate that he would not admit them to communion. The authorities judged this to be an act against the state, and he was arrested and exiled to Voronezh. There in 1928 he was arrested again, accused of being the ideological leader of the diocese; the charge was not proved and he was released.

Martyrdom

In 1930 he was arrested with the clergy and monks of the Alekseevsky Monastery, accused of anti-⁠Soviet agitation, carried out personally and through Archimandrite Tikhon (Krechkov). At his interrogations he answered briefly and named no one. He was gravely ill with tuberculosis and bore prison with difficulty; when the charge was put to him, he wrote that he rejected it as a plain lie. Arrested with him were the hieromonks George (Pozharov) and Kosma (Vyaznikov), the priest George Nikitin, and the laymen Euthymius Grebenshchikov and Peter Vyaznikov, who likewise did not admit guilt. On 28 July the OGPU Collegium condemned them to death. The sentence was read to them on the evening of 2 August, then they were loaded onto a truck and driven to the outskirts of Voronezh, and at ten that evening Archimandrite Tikhon, the hieromonks George and Kosma, the priests John Steblin-⁠Kamensky, Sergius Gortinsky, Theodore Yakovlev, Alexander Arkhangelsky and George Nikitin, and the two laymen were shot.

The saint is commemorated on 2 August and, in the new style, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 17 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Voronezh Metropolis.