New Hieromartyr Elias of Moscow

Life and Martyrdom

According to his life, Elias was born in a Moscow village in the nineteenth century and studied at the Moscow Theological Academy. He married a devout woman named Eugenia and was ordained to the priesthood. He served first in the small church of a poorhouse and then in the parish of Saint Nicholas in Tolmachi in Moscow, ministering there until the upheavals that followed the October Revolution of 1917.

In 1932 he was arrested and imprisoned by the Soviet secret police and exiled to the region of the Krasnaya Vishera River. His life records that during this exile he was made to walk over melting snow, was subjected to torture, and was prohibited from serving the divine services.

About two years into his imprisonment his wife, Matushka Eugenia, made the journey to his place of exile to visit him, carrying with her a Gospel book and a small vial of holy water. When she returned to Moscow she learned that a fire had swept through the concentration camp and that Elias had died in it together with eleven other Christians. He is commemorated on February 16.

Among the New Martyrs of Russia

Elias belongs to the vast company of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, the clergy, monastics, and laypeople who suffered for their faith under the Soviet authorities after 1917. Sources describe a persecution of such scale that the number of Russia's New Martyrs is said to exceed that of all the martyrs of the first three Christian centuries; countless Orthodox were arrested, exiled, tortured, and killed for their adherence to the Church.

The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia glorified the New Martyrs and Confessors collectively in 1981. Within Russia the Moscow Patriarchate, under Patriarch Alexei II, began individual glorifications in 1992 and, at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in the year 2000, glorified more than a thousand New Martyrs, with further names added over time by the Synodal Canonization Commission. The collective feast of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia is kept on the Sunday nearest January 25 (old style), February 7 (new style).