Presbyter
Hieromartyr Simeon Antonovich Konyukhov was born in 1852 into the family of a psalm-reader. In 1877 he was ordained to the priesthood and appointed to serve at the St. Stephen Church in the village of Nii, Solikamsk Uyezd. In 1916 he was transferred to the Holy Virgin–Entrance (Vvedenie) Edinoverie Church in the village of Vorobyi, Okhansk Uyezd.
On October 9, 1918, the 66-year-old pastor was arrested and taken to the Okhansk Cheka. Father Simeon was accused because circular letters of the dean—Father Petr Vyatkin (both dated April 2, 1918)—were found in his possession. In one of them the dean asks that a protest be drawn up over the new authorities’ seizure of the diocesan school, and in the other he asks that the diocesan administration be informed “of all cases of violence, seizure, and desecration of churches, monasteries, the clergy and holy things, and all the more so of cases of bloodshed and murder on religious grounds in local areas.”
Father Simeon was sentenced to death and shot by Red Army soldiers after cruel torture and abuse.
The son of the New Martyr, Priest Petr Konyukhov—who served in 1918 in the church of the nearby village of Govyrino and was arrested in 1927—gave the following testimony during interrogation: “My father was shot by Red Army soldiers in October 1918, because a curse upon the Bolsheviks had been posted by them, which was composed by Bishop Andronik and announced on the porch, on the doors.”
Hieromartyr Simeon Konyukhov was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia in August 2000 at the Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church.
