Martyr Nicholas Varzhansky

Nicholas Varzhansky was born on 25 November 1881 in Volhynia and graduated from the Moscow Theological Academy in 1907. He married Zinaida, daughter of the missionary Archpriest Neophytus Lyubimov, himself later a martyr. From 1908 he was a diocesan missionary in Moscow, wrote some forty books and pamphlets against sectarianism and Tolstoyanism, including the catechism 'The Good Confession' (1910), and founded the Varnavino temperance society for workers in Lefortovo. At the Local Council of 1917–1918 he served as secretary of the department on missions.

In 1918 he published a leaflet about the icon of St Nicholas on the Kremlin's Nikolsky Gate, from which a red banner had fallen on 1 May. On 31 May 1918 he was arrested at the flat of Archpriest John Vostorgov and held in Butyrka prison; petitions by Patriarch Tikhon and others were rejected. He was shot in 1918 and buried outside the wall of the Kalitnikovskoe cemetery in Moscow. He was glorified in 2000 and is commemorated on 23 August (5 September) with Hieromartyrs Ephraim of Selenga and John Vostorgov.