The life of St John Kochurov
He became the first resident priest of what grew into Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago, overseeing the building of its church under the guidance of the future Patriarch Tikhon, whom he had come to know well in those years.
He returned to Russia in 1907, served for a time in Estonia teaching the faith to children, and in 1916 was assigned to Saint Catherine's Cathedral in Tsarskoye Selo, near the imperial residence outside Saint Petersburg, where his preaching quickly drew a devoted following. When the Bolshevik uprising reached the town in October 1917, the people gathered in the churches to pray for peace. On October 31, Bolshevik forces entered Tsarskoye Selo and arrested Father John, taking him to the edge of town where he was shot, accused without evidence of having prayed for the wrong side in the fighting. His death made him the first Orthodox priest killed under Soviet rule, remembered afterward as the first among the many New Martyrs the Russian Church would lose in the century that followed. He was buried in the crypt of the cathedral he had so briefly served.
