Presbyter
On November 16, 2006, the sisters and staff of the Novo-Tikhvin Monastery in Yekaterinburg erected a cross at the site of the martyrdom of Saint Alexander (Popov). Father Alexander, a priest from the village of Travyanskoye in the Kamensky district, was brutally murdered in 1918 along with several of his parishioners. The diocesan commission for the canonization of saints managed to establish the names of the parishioners who perished alongside Father Alexander, as well as the location of their martyrdom.
This holy site is located one and a half kilometers from the village of Travyanskoye, in the Poloviny forest. In the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks brought the priest and eight parishioners of the Vvedenskaya Church. Before carrying out the execution, the murderers tortured them for a long time. Father Alexander had his spine, arm, and jaw broken, and his fingers cut off. The mutilated priest was lifted on bayonets. The other victims were treated with equal cruelty. The murderers then threw the bodies into a ravine, from where they were soon retrieved by the villagers.
When the wife of one of the tortured men saw what had happened to her husband, she lost her mind. Their children were effectively left orphaned. One of the murderers, Leonid Zuev, was killed by enraged villagers.
The site of the martyrdom of the holy martyr and the eight parishioners was indicated by an old resident of the village of Travyanskoye, Gennady Ivanovich Chemizov: “My father showed it to me. We often passed by this place when I was little, and it stuck in my memory.”
On November 16, Gennady Ivanovich and Yevgenia Andreyevna came together with the community of the monastery to the ravine in the Poloviny forest to honor the memory of their fellow villagers who met a martyr's end. After the cross was erected, the sisters read an Akathist to All Saints.
