Tavrion Tolokontsev

Holy Venerable Martyr Tavrion Tolokontsev, a monk, was born on 5 August 1871 in the Nikolsk district of Vologda province, in the family of the peasants Grigory Maksimovich and Olga Pavlovna Tolokontsev, and was named Matthew at baptism. On 26 August 1908 he entered the Transfiguration Monastery of Valaam, and on 26 June 1912 he was accepted as a novice. On 23 December 1920, at the Valaam metochion in Moscow, he was tonsured a monk and given the name Tavrion.

After the metochion was closed in 1925 he settled at the church of the Rzhev Icon of the Mother of God, serving as a chanter. Several Valaam monks rented an apartment nearby and formed a community with a common rule, table and obediences. All of them served in the church as priests or chanters, and the income went to a treasurer chosen by the community, who gave each five rubles a month for personal needs and also kept part of the funds of the Valaam monastery.

On 7 October 1930 the apartment was searched, the monastery funds were seized, and the brethren, among them the monk Tavrion, were arrested and held in Butyrka prison. Asked what he would do from then on, he answered, as the record preserves it, that he would serve the Church as long as it existed. At the interrogation of 16 October he said that he lived in the community and sang in the church, and that the monks spoke among themselves of the hardships of the servants of the cult, who were deprived of rations and arrested and even shot without guilt. Yet he held that the Lord had permitted this government for the sins of men, that all authority is from God according to the Apostle Paul, and that one must pray for its betterment.

The investigation ended on 13 November 1930. The charge was that the group of monks, after the metochion was dissolved in 1925, had taken part of the monastery's property and set up an illegal monastery, and that they spread rumours about the persecution of religion. On 23 November the OGPU Collegium sentenced him to three years of exile in the Northern Region, which he spent in the Vologda area. He stayed in the region after his release, and in 1937 Archbishop Pitirim (Krylov) invited him to Veliky Ustyug, where he lived in the watchman's hut by the church of Saint John the Forerunner.

While churches were being closed one after another, some nuns living near a church left without a priest asked him to intercede for it and to serve there as priest. He agreed and travelled to Moscow, where he met Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), and to Arkhangelsk, but his efforts came to nothing. On 3 December 1937 he was arrested and interrogated the same day. He denied any counter-⁠revolutionary activity and said that he had gone to Moscow and Arkhangelsk only to ask for the reopening of the church in Dymkovo.

On 10 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a labour camp. On 12 March 1939 he was sent to the prison in Gryazovets, and on 4 April to the labour colony at Novoezero, housed in the ruined buildings of the monastery there. He reposed in that colony on 7 June 1939 and was buried in an unknown grave.

Saint Tavrion is commemorated on 7 June, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 11 July (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vologda, on 22 August (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Valaam, and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, all in the new style.