Venerable Martyr Maria was born in 1869 in the city of Yaroslavl into the family of the worker Vasily Tseitlin. In 1886, she entered the Bogoroditse-Smolensk Novodevichy Convent as a novice. After the revolution, the monastery was looted and closed. Nun Maria settled on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street, where she gathered with other sisters.
Informants who lived in the same building as Nun Maria or nearby regularly reported to the NKVD that the sisters of the monastery sometimes met together and held conversations, comparing contemporary life with the pre-revolutionary period. The authorities arrested her on March 21, 1938, and she was interrogated the following day.
On June 3, 1938, an NKVD troika sentenced her to eight years in a corrective labor camp. On December 7, 1938, she arrived at Siblag, where she died on December 15 and was buried in an unknown grave.
