Sevastiana Ageeva-⁠Zueva

Holy Venerable Martyr Sevastiana Ageeva-⁠Zueva was a nun, spiritual daughter and household helper of Metropolitan Seraphim Chichagov, and she fell asleep in the Bamlag camp on 11 July 1938.

She was born on 20 November 1872 in the village of Staro-⁠Ivantsevo, Arzamas district, Nizhny Novgorod province, in the family of the peasants Chariton Nikitich and Minodora Abramovna Ageev-⁠Zuev, and at baptism received the name Stefanida. In 1892 she entered the Resurrection Fyodorovsky Convent in the Vladimir diocese as a novice and from 30 May worked in the kitchen. In 1915 the nun Arsenia (Dobronravova) was named abbess. In 1924 she received into the convent Metropolitan Seraphim (Chichagov), returned from exile, who stayed there several years until he was appointed to the see of Saint Petersburg, by then renamed after the city's new name. The metropolitan was seventy-⁠two, and Abbess Arsenia gave him two nuns to help in the household, one of them Stefanida, by then tonsured into the mantle with the name Sevastiana. In 1933 the metropolitan was retired and settled in a private house in the settlement of Udelnaya near Moscow, where the nuns Sevastiana and Vera (Vtyurina) followed him.

On 30 November 1937 Metropolitan Seraphim was arrested, on 7 December an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 11 December he was shot at Butovo. On 10 December the nuns Sevastiana and Vera were arrested and questioned the same day. Sevastiana said that since 1927 she had had no occupation and lived on gifts from admirers of Metropolitan Seraphim, that she was one of them and had served under him, that many clergy, monastics and laity came to him for counsel, and that he served at home, where she attended with the helper nun and other admirers. Of Soviet power she said that she did not recognize it and held it to be the power of the Antichrist, sent by God as a punishment for the people's sins, and that she had said so to others; she admitted that she had told believers not to take part in the elections to the Supreme Soviet, since that power destroyed churches and exiled believers and clergy without guilt. She was illiterate; the record was read to her and she signed it with her thumbprint.

On 20 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced her to eight years in a camp. She fell asleep in Bamlag, in the Far East, on 11 July 1938 and was buried in an unknown place. She is commemorated on 11 July and, in the new style, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 20 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Ivanovo Metropolis and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.