Simeon Turkin

Holy Martyr Simeon Turkin was church warden of the Dormition church in the village of Simbukhovo near Moscow, and he was shot at Butovo on 23 September 1937, together with the priest Peter Yurkov.

He was born on 1 February 1870 in the village of Simbukhovo, Vereya district, in the family of the peasant Jacob Turkin. He finished the village school; from 1894 to 1897 he served in the army with the rank of non-⁠commissioned officer, then for several months was a policeman at Naro-⁠Fominsk and afterwards lived in his native village, where he was for a time volost elder. In 1918 he witnessed the uprising of the peasants of the Vereya district; hearing of the unrest, he went to see, tried to persuade the peasants to disperse, but nobody listened to him. Later he was seized by a detachment of Latvians and sent under guard to Vereya, but after interrogation he was freed. In the twenties he organized a building artel and took contracts for houses. In 1933 he was elected church warden of the Dormition church in Simbukhovo.

Toward the end of the thirties a pitiless persecution began. The priest of the church, Peter Alexeevich Yurkov, born in 1880 in the village of Vyshegorod, ordained deacon and then priest in 1926 and moved to Simbukhovo, and the church warden Semyon Yakovlevich Turkin were arrested on 8 September 1937. Duty witnesses stated that the priest, making use of feasts, urged the collective farmers to return to the faith, saying that a time would come and it would be too late. At the interrogation the priest denied any counter-⁠revolutionary activity, and Turkin said that in his four years as warden he had been in contact with the priest only for common work and they had carried out no agitation. Asked about the remark at the tea house, at the time of the draft Stalinist constitution, where he was alleged to have said that the party had come to its senses and given rights to the Church, he answered that a man there had told him they would close the church, and he had replied that now they would not close it, since freedom had been given and the Church separated from the state, and that he had said nothing more. The priest Peter and the church warden Simeon were sentenced to death, shot on 23 September 1937 and buried in an unknown grave at Butovo.

He is commemorated on 23 September and, in the new style, on 29 May (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.