Sergius Shipulin

Saint Sergius Shipulin, hieromartyr, was a priest of the Russian Church, born at Velsk in 1874 and killed in 1937, in the time of the Soviet persecution. He is a locally venerated saint of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, in the diocese of Kharkiv.

He was born on 31 December 1874 at Velsk, in the Vologda governorate, today in the Arkhangelsk region. He was baptized on 2 January 1875. He had a secondary education and apparently finished the Vologda seminary. At Kharkiv he served in various churches of the city, without a parish of his own.

On 27 October 1937 he was arrested and sentenced to five years in a labor camp. He was shot in 1937. He was rehabilitated on 24 March 1989. The source puts side by side the sentence of five years in a camp and the shooting in the same year, without explaining.

His father, Pavel Mikhailovich Shipulin, was an assistant accountant at the treasury of the Velsk district, and his mother was Lydia Vasilievna Shipulina. His brothers were Boris Shipulin, archbishop of Tashkent, and Vasily Shipulin (1879 to the 1930s), a priest in Veliky Ustyug.

On 22 June 1993 the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine decided on his local canonization in the diocese of Kharkiv, in the Synaxis of the new martyrs and confessors of the Sloboda land. The service of glorification was held on 3 and 4 July 1993, during the visit to Kharkiv of the primate of the Church, Metropolitan Vladimir of Kyiv and all Ukraine, in the cathedral of the Annunciation.