Yaroslav Savitsky

Holy Hieromartyr Yaroslav Savitsky was an archpriest in the village of Yam, near Moscow, and was shot on 8 December 1937 at Butovo. He is numbered among the new martyrs of the twentieth century.

The priest

He was born on 28 March 1882 in the village of Pukhloye, in the Belsk district of Grodno province, in the family of the deacon Isaac Savitsky. Like so many priests' sons, he followed his father: he graduated from the seminary in 1903, was a teacher and then a reader, and in 1905 was ordained priest. Shortly before this he married Olga Feodorovna, and they had two sons and a daughter. It seems he served at the Krasnostok convent in Grodno, founded in 1901. During the First World War the clergy and nuns left Grodno for the Ekaterininsk hermitage in the Podolsk district near Moscow. In 1919 he was raised to the rank of archpriest for his zealous service. When the hermitage was closed as a monastery, the nuns formed an agricultural labour commune and held out in this way until 1929. For his service, in November 1923, Abbess Helen asked Patriarch Tikhon to honour Father Yaroslav with the palitsa, and the patriarch wrote on the petition: "Let him be deemed worthy." In the twenties the priest and his family were deprived of voting rights.

In 1929 the commune was disbanded, the church closed, and Father Yaroslav was appointed rector of the church of the Holy Martyrs Florus and Laurus in the village of Yam. When he moved there with his family, the parish house had already been taken, and they had nowhere to live. A parishioner, Maria Feodorovna Kishenkova, took them into a small room in her house, where they lived until his arrest, with no property other than a few personal belongings.

Martyrdom

The people of Yam said that the priest was very kind-⁠hearted, loved by all his parishioners, and they praised his learning, intelligence and strength of character. These qualities and his firm faith drew persecution upon him. In 1933 he was tried by the Podolsk people's court for buying candles and sentenced to five years, but the case was so crudely fabricated that the regional court overturned the decision. His accusers later wrote that during the collectivization he had held in the church, on 18 March 1930, a demonstration of nearly a hundred and seventy people, which set out with spiritual hymns toward the village soviet, and that he had served molebens for the health of the exiled peasants.

He was arrested on 27 November 1937 and held in the Serpukhov prison. He did not admit guilt of anti-⁠Soviet agitation. On 1 December 1937 the NKVD troika of the Moscow region sentenced him to death. Archpriest Yaroslav Savitsky was shot on 8 December 1937 and buried at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. He is commemorated on 8 December, on 29 May (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, and on 5 September (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in new style.