Sergius Vedernikov

Holy Martyr Sergius Vedernikov was a peasant, merchant and church warden of the village of Pogorelye in Tver province, and he was shot on 1 October 1937. He was canonized in the year 2000.

In 1937, together with the clergy, the members of the parish "twenties" and the church wardens were arrested. One of them was Sergius Nikolaevich Vedernikov, born in 1875 in the village of Pogorelye (now Zubtsov district), into a poor peasant family. By steady work and God's help he rose out of poverty: in 1907 he opened a drapery shop in the village, which he kept until 1916, then ran a tea house and farmed with the most modern implements of the time. Until his arrest in 1928 he was chairman of the church council. In 1928, in the campaign to close churches, he was arrested and sentenced to six months in a camp; in 1930, after the confiscation of all his property, he was exiled to the Urals.

Being alone, without family or children, he could give himself wholly to God and the Church, and when he returned to his native village the believers unanimously chose him church warden; this election and his work for the Church were the cause of a new arrest. With the start of the persecution in 1937 he was arrested and on 28 July imprisoned at Zubtsov. The next day the investigator asked how he had become church warden and learned that the believers had elected him on 28 February 1937. Charged with counter-⁠revolutionary propaganda, he answered that he did not admit guilt. The investigator ascribed to him words from June 1937, spoken in the church watchman's room, about the people's hard material condition, the lack of bread and the fact that all the grain had been shipped to Spain; he said that he did not recall and had not spoken so. The inquiry ended with the finding that he was guilty of having been church warden. On 27 September an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 1 October 1937 he was shot.

He was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000. He is commemorated on 1 October and, in the new style, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors and on 18 July (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver.