Stephen Kostogryz

Holy Hieromartyr Stephen Kostogryz was a priest in the Odessa region and was shot in a camp in Kazakhstan on 26 September 1937, together with the priest Alexander Aksenov.

Stephen Grigorievich Kostogryz was born in 1887 in the town of Berislav, Kherson province. From 1915 he was psalm-⁠reader at the church of the Archangel Michael in the village of Slobodzeya, Tiraspol district, probably from 1924 deacon, and from 1933 priest and rector of the same church. In 1935 he was arrested, on a charge of trying to cross the state border and of counter-⁠revolutionary activity, received seven years of forced labour and was sent to the NKVD Karlag. In 1937, while in the camp, he was arrested again, accused of "systematic agitation among the prisoners and praise of the tsarist order".

Alexander Petrovich Aksenov was born in 1886 in the village of Rychkovo, Nikolsk district, Vologda province, graduated from the Vologda Seminary, married and from 1917 was priest at the church of Saint Nicholas in the village of Chernovsko-⁠Nikolaevskoe. In 1929 he was arrested on a charge of anti-⁠Soviet agitation and exiled for three years to the North. Father Stephen and Father Alexander served in different dioceses, but in 1937 both came to Karlag, where a single group case was drawn up against them and they were condemned to death for systematic counter-⁠revolutionary agitation among the prisoners. They were shot together at the first Volkovo section of the NKVD Karlag on 26 September 1937.

He is commemorated on 26 September and, in the new style, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church.