Presbyter
Hieromartyr Matfiy (Matthias) Mikhailovich Voznesensky is included in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kursk. He was born on August 9, 1860, on the feast day of the Apostle Matthias, into the family of the deacon of the St. Nicholas Church in the village of Rechitsy, Lgov District, Kursk Province, Mikhail Timofeevich Voznesensky, and his wife Evdokia Pavlovna, and was baptized on August 12.
There were eleven children in the Voznesensky family. In the records of the Belgorod Theological Seminary, where Matfiy Voznesensky studied from 1877 to 1883, he is listed among the “children of poor deacons,” “who, though having parents, are in special need of state support due to their extreme poverty.”
After graduating from the seminary in the first category with the title of student, Matfiy Mikhailovich was appointed psalm-reader at the Cathedral of the Dormition in the town of Novy Oskol. On June 10, 1885, a resolution of the ruling hierarch granted Matfiy Voznesensky a priestly post at the Ascension Church in the settlement of Foshchevataya, Korochansky District, Kursk Province. His ordination to the priesthood took place on August 6 of the same year.
Father Matfiy’s priestly ministry, which lasted nearly thirty-five years in a single parish, was highly fruitful. From November 1886 he served as head and teacher of the Law of God at the parish literacy school in Foshchevataya. In 1896, “through the zeal of the parishioners and voluntary donations,” a new single-altar Ascension Church was built there, “a wooden structure on a stone foundation, solid, without a bell tower.” From 1908 construction began on a vast stone church, and by the beginning of the First World War its brick walls had risen. According to the recollections of A. D. Chetverikova, an “enormous cement cross was also made on the floor.”
In 1891 Priest Matfiy Voznesensky was awarded the nabedrennik, in 1903 the skufia, and in 1912 the kamilavka. On September 20, 1911, he was appointed dean of the 5th district of Korochansky District, becoming the head of the clergy of fourteen parishes. The “Kursk Diocesan Gazette” records above all his activity in collecting contributions and donations for the Kursk Committee of the Orthodox Missionary Society (from 1912), for the repair of the Cathedral of the Sign at the Kursk Znamensky Monastery (1913), and for the equipment and maintenance of the Kursk Znamensky hospital-sanatorium in the Bishop’s Grove (1914).
According to the recollections of fellow villagers, Father Matfiy Voznesensky was killed by Budyonny’s soldiers. Details of the tragedy of 1919 in Foshchevataya became known from memoir letters of Antonina Dmitrievna Chetverikova (1910–2006), the daughter of a priest from the settlement of Klinovets: “...They killed Father Matfiy at night, calling him out of his house, murdered him in his garden, and buried him shallowly, with his knees bent. The hieromartyr was buried in the cemetery outside the village, and the local authorities long refused permission for his body to be committed to the earth.”
