Sergius Pokrovsky

Holy Hieromartyr Sergius Pokrovsky was an archpriest in Kaluga province, a former seminarian with revolutionary ideas, and he was shot on 1 November 1937.

He was born on 5 September 1880 in the village of Burino, Tarusa district, Kaluga province, in the family of the psalm-⁠reader Nicholas Pokrovsky. In 1901 he entered the Kaluga Seminary, where there were circles of mostly socialist leaning, in one of which he took part, holding secret meetings in the forest and at private lodgings. He graduated in 1904 and was a teacher in the village of Korenevo. In the summer of 1905 he was drawn to the Socialist Revolutionary party and, with a fellow teacher, carried on propaganda among the peasants and spread literature of that kind. The plays they staged at the school led one evening to disorder in the crowd; an inquiry began, but the young man wrote to an acquaintance, the son of the police captain, asking him to persuade his father not to arrest them, and the case was hushed up.

In 1907 he was ordained priest in the village of Kasyanovo. The party leaders in Kaluga thought they would use the priest for their ideas, but he, having become a priest, understood the good of the people differently: in 1908 he left the party and devoted his whole life to God and his flock. He was soon moved to the village of Nikitskoe in the Medyn district and raised to archpriest. By his selfless service he won great authority; people came constantly for help and advice, and he never refused anyone, at any hour or in any weather. He preached at every service. When the persecution began, he was pressed with threats to renounce his rank in exchange for his life, but he was neither frightened nor persuaded.

He was arrested on 15 August 1937 and imprisoned at Medyn. The respect and love of the people were so great that neither after his arrest nor after his death did they leave his orphaned children without help: they brought them food, most often by night and in secret, though they risked being accused of sympathy with the "enemy". At his interrogation he rejected the charges that he had been a secret agent, had grouped hostile people around him, had taken part in the Medyn uprising of 1918, had refused to serve molebens in houses with portraits of the leaders, had agitated against the collective farms, or had praised Hitler. On 20 October an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 1 November 1937 he was shot and buried in an unknown grave.

He is commemorated on 1 November 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 31 July in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kaluga.