Martyr Alexius (Alexei Danilovich) Zverev

IMPORTANT CORRECTION: the category has been corrected from "hieromartyr" to "martyr" — Alexius was a layman and was never ordained. DATE CORRECTION: none of the three previously listed dates (February 12, May 20, October 2) were confirmed by any source — they have been replaced with the correct, sole confirmed date.

Martyr Alexius (Alexei Danilovich Zverev) was born in 1867 or 1868 (sources disagree; 1871/72 also appears) in the village of Borisovo, Moscow province, into an Old Believer (priestless) peasant family; he converted to Orthodoxy in his youth. From 1902 he served as a missionary for the Moscow diocese, holding public and in-church debates with Old Believers. In 1917 he was elected a lay delegate from the Moscow diocese to the All-Russian Local Council of 1917–1918.

In August 1918 he was sent as part of a three-person Synodal commission (together with Archbishop Vasily (Bogoyavlensky) of Chernigov and Archimandrite Matthew (Pomerantsev)) to Perm to investigate the killing of Archbishop Andronik (Nikolsky) of Perm. On the return journey the train was stopped by Red Army soldiers near a bridge over the Kama river; all three were taken off and shot — Zverev was gunned down while trying to flee toward a forest. Tradition holds the bodies were weighted and thrown into the river.

He was glorified among the saints of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia by the Jubilee Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in August 2000.

His feast is kept on August 14/27.