New Hieromartyr Elias Bazhanov

Elias (Ilia) Bazhanov was a Russian Orthodox priest of the Ryazan and Moscow regions who was executed during the Soviet anti-religious persecution of 1937. He is numbered among the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, the great body of clergy and laity who suffered for the faith under the Soviet state in the twentieth century. His commemoration is kept on September 3.

According to Russian sources, he was born on July 24, 1877 in the village of Selishchi in the Kasimov district of Ryazan province, the son of a psalmist, Vasily Alekseevich Bazhanov, and his wife Tatiana. He completed his studies at the Ryazan Theological Seminary and entered church service, working first as a teacher at a parish school and then, in 1901, being ordained to the diaconate. In 1914 he was ordained to the priesthood and assigned to a parish in the Egorievsk district, where he also continued to serve as a teacher and overseer of a church school. In 1921 he was transferred to the Resurrection Church in the village of Karamyshevo in the Kasimov district, and in time was elevated to the rank of archpriest.

During the intensified persecution of the Church in 1937, Father Elias was arrested on August 20 and charged with counter-revolutionary activity — a standard accusation brought against clergy in that period. He was sentenced to death by an NKVD troika and shot in September 1937, his body being buried at the former NKVD firing range near Butovo, south of Moscow. His brother, the priest Konstantin Bazhanov, also of Selishchi, suffered a martyr's death the same year. Father Elias was glorified among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church at the Jubilee Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000.