Saint Zofia Sieliwiorstowa

Zofia Sieliwiorstowa, born Sofiya Panfilovna Selivyorstova (September 17, 1871, in Iznair – February 28, 1938, at the Butovo firing range), was a Russian novice who was canonized in 2000 as part of the Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church. Born into a peasant family, she lost both parents at the age of ten. She was raised in an orphanage in Krasiushkino, which was attached to a female religious community that was later established as a monastery. At the age of twenty, she moved to Saint Petersburg, where she studied drawing and earned a living as a domestic servant. In 1898, she met a nun from the Passion Monastery in Moscow, through whom she was admitted to the community as a novice. In the monastery, she taught drawing to the nuns and remained there until its closure in 1926. After the community was liquidated by the Soviet authorities, she lived with five other nuns in a house on Tikhvinskaya Street in Moscow. In November 1937, all the sisters were arrested. Sofiya Selivyorstova avoided imprisonment because she was not at home when the others were taken. She was arrested on February 22, 1938, brought before an NKVD troika on charges of conducting counter-revolutionary agitation, sentenced to death, and executed by firing squad on February 28 at the Butovo firing range. She was recognized as a holy new martyr by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in August 2000 and included in the Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church.