Guri (Pavlov)

Born in 1906 by an Orthodox Chuvash peasant family. Father - Pavel Ivanovich, mother - Varvara Mikhailovna, paternal grandfather was a priest. The family had eight children, three of whom died in infancy.

In 1916 he graduated from a parish school in his native village, then he studied for two years in the village of Yantikovo, Kazan province .

Since childhood, he dreamed of a monastic life, loved solitude and silence. In 1920, he left home, lived in the St. Alexander Chuvash monastery. After its closure in 1923, he was a novice in several monasteries - in Makaryevsky , then Raifsky monasteries of the Kazan province and the Mother of God-Odigitrievsky monastery of the Ufa province . The frequent change of cloisters was forced and was associated with the closure of monasteries.

Catacomb Hieromonk

Around 1927 he moved to Ufa , where he lived at the Simeon Church. Soon after, a group of Orthodox Chuvashs who did not recognize the Deputy Patriarchal Locum Tenens Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) , turned to Archbishop Andrei (Ukhtomsky) with a request to ordain a priest for her. Archbishop Andrei himself was in exile, but with his blessing, Bishop Habakkuk (Borovkov) tonsured the novice Semyon Pavlov in October 1928 as a monk with the name Guri and ordained him hierodeacon . A few days later, another colleague of Bishop Andrey, Bishop Benjamin (Trinity) ordained him a hieromonk , parting of the newly appointed priest as follows: “Father Gury! Sending you like a sheep to a herd surrounded by wolves. But be patient, for he who endures to the end will be saved. ” Bishop Habakkuk later presented him with his photograph with an inscription on the back: “In memory of dear Fr. Guria, so that he always loves and lives for the churching of the Chuvash. ”

He was one of the associates of Bishop Nektarios (Trezvinsky) , in 1929 he served in the village Shutnerovo of the Kazan province. Belonged to the “Union of the Orthodox Church” - an association of believers who rejected the Deputy Patriarchal Locum Tenens Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) ^[1] .

In the summer of 1929 he was arrested, but was able to escape from the pre-trial detention cell through a grate that was sawn at night by two cellmates. Secretly served for some time. In 1931 he was arrested twice. In 1932 he was again arrested, sent to Cheboksary prison, was sentenced to three years in prison. He served his sentence in Svirlag , from where he fled and returned to Chuvashia. For 15 years he lived in a stable, served in a barn, where a secret church was built.

He created several underground churches in which he periodically served. His biography contains such information about this side of his activity:

The first such church was small for 5-10 people, and the last - already for 50-60 people. It was excavated in the village of Khurlamal under the house of one of the Christians, who helped Fr. Guria build this church. They removed the dug up land at night out of the village and dumped it in a ditch, covering it with a layer of black soil from above. The church was 30-35 steps deep down. She had real arches, that is, she was, as it were, under the dome, thanks to good strong clay. There was an altar in the church. For many years he served in this church about. Guri, but then had to leave, as the owners' son married an unreliable girl who could not be trusted.

In 1947 he was arrested, but the next day he escaped from the window of a hospital in which he was detained. Secretly served in the city of Tsivilsk . In 1948 he was arrested again, was kept in a Cheboksary prison for a year and a half, and in 1949 he was transferred to a camp where he worked at a logging business. For refusing to work on church holidays and Sundays, he was constantly imprisoned in a punishment cell. In 1956 he was released due to amnesty and state of health (he was ill with chronic bronchitis ), was again in an illegal situation, did not have a passport.

He secretly served in the Volga region , feeding the “catacomb” communities under the guise of a carpenter and stove-maker (he was also engaged in these crafts).

Personally met with Anthony (Lobov) , Anthony (Golynsky) and Gennady (Sekach) , but rejected them as non-canonical hierarchs.

In 1962, he bought a small house from one of his spiritual children at the Turlema station, in which he arranged a secret church, in which services were held at night. At the same time, as before, he continued to visit believers who lived in the Chuvash villages. In the 1980s, he lived in a house owned by the secret nun Filonil, taking care of her and her sister (both elderly women were paralyzed). In the barn at this house back in 1964, Father Guri set up a small secret church. He commemorated the services of the first hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCOR), learning about their change with great delay.

Relationship with the ROCA

In 1988, he established contact with the Synod of Bishops of the ROCOR and transmitted the request of the "catacomb" believers for his placement in the bishops.

In 1990, he received a passport to leave for the United States, which caused rejection of the most radical-minded part of his flock. He was elevated by Metropolitan Vitaly (Ustinov) to the rank of Archimandrite . However, his episcopal consecration in the ROCOR did not take place due to the non-recognition by Archimandrite Gury of the ROCA bishop Lazar (Zhurbenko) , who controlled the parishes of the "foreigners" in Russia.

One of his contemporaries, who met with Guriy in September 1990 in Moscow, recalled him so:

In a more than modest room serving a large prayer family, we saw Father Guri. Like everyone who has met him, he impressed us to the core. A bent old man, small and fragile, but at the same time so majestic, noble, full of inner dignity. Even among people far from the Church, he involuntarily evoked a sense of reverence. It seemed that he did not belong to the present time, so everything in him was alien to the surrounding “Soviet reality”. It was as if from another time, as if being a living testimony of Orthodox Russia, about which we had only a vague idea of ​​the irrevocably “departed Rus” that our fathers and grandfathers so tragically lost.

Upon learning of this consecration, the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad under the chairmanship of Metropolitan Vitaly (Ustinov) banned Archimandrite Guri in the priesthood ^[2] :

On October 11/24, 1991, the Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia had a judgment: On your autocratic appropriation of the episcopal dignity, being a catacomb cleric administered by the Russian Orthodox Free Church, at the hands of Greek bishops not recognized by our Church as canonical. The so-called bishops who reside in the Transfiguration Monastery in Boston (USA), and who committed the so-called sovereign over you consecration, headed by the diocese, consisting mainly of former clergymen of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, banned in priesthood and deprived of their dignity. In addition, the head of this church association, the so-called. Archbishop Auxentius, residing in Greece, was at one time deprived of the episcopal dignity by the Council of his own bishops.

Decided: To ban you in the ministry, until repentance, for illegally appropriating the episcopal rank from uncanonical bishops. Your consecration is not recognized as legal

Bishop of the Auxentia Synod

After that, to receive the bishopric, he transferred to the Greek old- style Auxentius Synod ; at the head of this group was Archbishop Auxentius (Pastras) . To do this, he again went to the USA, where he lived for two months in the old-fashioned Boston Transfiguration Monastery . The flock of Bishop Guria entered into a prayer-canonical communion with the Greek Old-timers-Auxentians and remained in this jurisdiction after his death.

July 28, 1991 he was ordained in the Russian Holy Resurrection Church of Worcester (near Boston ) in the Bishop of Kazan. The consecration was performed by the Metropolitan of Kefalonia Maxim (Vallianatos) , the Bishop of Boston Ephraim (Spanos) and the Bishop of Toronto, Macarius (Katre) . Archbishop Auxentius refused to participate in consecration due to illness.

Died January 7, 1996 at Christmas, buried in Chuvashia .

• About the stay of father, then Bishop Guria in the USA in the summer of 1991. According to the records of monk Nikolai
• Guri (Pavlov) on the site "Russian Orthodoxy"
• The secret church is a zealot: Bishop Guri of Kazan and his partisans. Biographies and documents . Comp. L. E. Sikorska. M., Bratonezh, 2008.
• Berman A. G. Pages of the history of Orthodoxy in Chuvashia in the XX century
• From the former NKVD archive