New Hieromartyr Meletius Fedyunev

Meletius (Fedyunev) was a hieromonk of the Komi land who died during the Soviet persecution of the Church and is numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. Born Mikhail Mikhailovich Fedyunev in 1871 in the village of Zanulye in the Ust-Sysolsk district of Vologda Province (within the territory of the present-day Komi Republic), he entered monastic life and was ordained a hieromonk at the Trinity-Stefan (Ulyanov) male monastery near the village of Ulyanovo. The anchor record commemorates him on September 10; external accounts give the feast as September 23 on the civil calendar, which corresponds to September 10 on the old calendar.

After the Bolshevik closure of his monastery in 1918, he remained in the region. He was first arrested in 1919 on a charge of concealing grain and held in a concentration camp on the Northern Dvina, and he was the subject of further investigations in 1929 and 1932 on charges connected to currency and church valuables, neither of which reached trial. He afterward settled in the village of Kuzhba in the Ust-Kulom district of the Komi ASSR, where, according to the sources, he carried out priestly services apart from a functioning church.

He was arrested for the last time in 1937 and sentenced to death by a troika of the NKVD for the Komi ASSR. He was shot at Syktyvkar on September 23, 1937. He was canonized for general veneration as one of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia on October 6, 2001, by determination of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, and is also commemorated among the saints of the Komi land.