Bishop Nikolai (in the world - Nikolai Ivanovich Shemetillo ; 1877 , village Obrovo , Pinsk district , Minsk province - 1933 ) - clergyman of the Russian Orthodox Church , bishop of Slutsk , vicar of the Minsk diocese .
Biography
He was born in 1877 in the small village of Obrovo, Pinsk district, in the family of the hereditary priest John Shemetillo.
In 1878, Fr. John Shemetillo was transferred to the best parish - to the church in honor of the Protection of the Mother of God of the village Plotnitsa, for which there were six registered chapels. In Carpenter and passed the childhood of Nikolai Shemetillo. Besides him, Father John had three sons and four daughters. From childhood, Nicholas attended the local parish church, served in it to his father, sang in the church choir.
In his youth, Nikolai Shemetillo graduated from the Pinsk Theological School, then - the Minsk Theological Seminary (1897). Distinguished by great abilities, at the beginning of our century he entered the Moscow Theological Academy , where he studied on the same course with Pavel Florensky . During his studies at the Academy, he perfectly mastered several foreign languages, and also studied in depth the Hebrew , Ancient Greek and Latin languages , and was able to read the Bible freely.
Upon returning home, Nikolay Shemetillo entered into marriage and was ordained a priest . The first place of his ministry was the church in the name of the Holy Archangel Michael in Slutsk .
The parish turned out to be significant in size and Father Nicholas, having assumed the position of his abbot, had to exert a lot of effort and work for the spiritual care of his parishioners.
In 1911, for his zeal in the pastoral ministry, he received his first award - a hilt . Then followed other awards: kamilavka , pectoral cross . Soon he was elevated to the rank of archpriest .
In 1914, he was appointed rector of the Słuck Nicholas Cathedral. At the same time, he assumed the duties of the chairman of the Slutsk branch of the Diocesan College Council, which was in charge of the state of theological education in Slutsk district . Widowed.
After the revolution, he continued to live in Slutsk .
In March 1923, Metropolitan Melchizedek (Payevsky), in the service of another bishop (it is unclear what) he ordained as bishop, appointing to the Slutsk Vicar Department. Fought with the renovation split.
In 1926, a criminal case was opened against Bishop Nikolai (Shemetillo), as well as the priests Vasily Pavlyukevich and Mikhail Lukashevich. It lasted almost a year and ended with Vladyka Nicholas and Fr. Basil was released for lack of evidence of a “crime”, and priest Mikhail Lukashevich, who spoke particularly sharply at the meeting, by the decision of the Special Meeting of the OGPU College of June 17, 1927, was sentenced to three years of exile in the town of Gadyach of Poltava District .
He lived in a private apartment on Resurrection Lane with his son and an old maid who helped him in caring for a child. Having reached the age of majority, his son Boris began to serve as a psalm-reader in St. Nicholas Cathedral. In 1929, his son was arrested and he was imprisoned for three years in a concentration camp. After his release he lived in Astrakhan , and he was ordained to the priesthood. Then he was arrested again.
According to the priest Valerian Novitsky, who was shot in 1930, by the end of the 20s, Vladyka "was completely deaf from nervous shocks." Nevertheless, until the last days of his life at liberty, he faithfully fulfilled his archpastoral duties: he often performed divine services, ordained new candidates for the holy priesthood, and at the same time lived very modestly, constantly helping the needy than he could.
March 16, 1933 was arrested. At the same time, the authorities closed down the St. Nicholas Cathedral. Together with the bishop, they freed all priests who served in Slutsk and nearby, as well as some of the most active parishioners who visited the cathedral. All of them fell into the field of a particularly powerful wave of arrests that swept through many villages and cities of Eastern Belarus in February-March 1933.
The interrogation protocol of Bishop Nicholas (Shemetillo) stated that by heading the so-called “Slutsk branch of a counterrevolutionary organization”, he drew many representatives of the clergy of Slutsk district into it , and also had the intention to return the newly renovated people, headed by "Bishop" Savvaty (Zosimovich).
During interrogation, it turned out that Vladyka Nicholas often quite impartially spoke of the order that existed at that time.
Being imprisoned, Bishop Nicholas was not afraid at the end of the interrogation protocol to make an addition: “Although the king and the kulaks are not there, the Soviet authorities will never destroy the priests, because if they arrest some, new faces of the spiritual will grow from below titles. The very life of the present time is characterized by some element, people are robbed everywhere, crime is increasing, but time will pass and the Soviet authorities will turn to clergy for help for their religious and moral education. No weapon will destroy it. ”
After long interrogations, a meeting of the Special Troika of the NKVD of June 9, 1933, Bishop Nikolay (Shemetillo) was sentenced to a concentration camp for a term of eight years.
Regarding the last days of his life there are two versions. According to one of them, he died of typhus on June 23, 1933, while being treated at the 3rd Soviet Hospital in Minsk. This is evidenced by a medical certificate stored in his “investigation file”. There is no other evidence to that effect.
According to another version, Bishop Nikolai was shot. An eyewitness to his shooting, which took place on the outskirts of the city, happened to be a believing railway worker who knew Bishop Nicholas by sight. This railroad man remembered the place of execution, where Vladyka was buried by escorts from the Minsk prison of the NKVD. Through friends, the railwayman took out the priestly vestments. Together with them, at night, secretly dug up the grave and clothed the lord, then he was buried. It happened in the former German cemetery, which after the end of the war was turned into a square near the street to them. Petra Kupriyanov.