Yuri Skobtsov

Saint Yuri (George) Skobtsov, martyr, was a Russian subdeacon, a man of charity and a participant in the French Resistance, born in 1921 at Tiflis and dead in 1944 in the camp at Dora. He was numbered among the saints by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2004. The calendars place him on 20 July.

He was born on 27 February 1921, in the family of Elizaveta Yurievna Skobtsova, who later became known as Mother Maria, and D. E. Skobtsov-⁠Kondratiev. He emigrated with his mother and lived in Paris. He took part in the work of the aid and educational organization "Orthodox Action", which supported Russian emigrants.

In 1934 he was vested in the sticharion, and from 1943 he was subdeacon. During the German occupation he took part in the Resistance movement and helped the persecuted. On 8 February 1943, in the absence of its leaders, a search was made in the premises of "Orthodox Action". In the pocket of Yuri, who was twenty-⁠two, was found a note from a Jewish woman asking Father Dimitri Klepinin for a baptismal certificate. Yuri was arrested and taken to the Gestapo. The next day Dimitri Klepinin was arrested, and on 10 February Maria Skobtsova too.

Yuri was held in the camp of Royallieu, near Paris, then moved to Buchenwald, then to the camp of Dora, where he died on 1 February 1944, according to other reports on 10 February. He was canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2004, in Paris, in the cathedral of Alexander Nevsky on rue Daru.