On September 26 (September 13 on the Julian Calendar) we commemorate Saints Stefan Kostogryz and Alexander Aksenov, Priests and Martyrs of the Communist Yoke, who reposed in the Lord in 1937.
Hieromartyr Stefan Grigorievich Kostogryz was born in 1887 in the city of Berislav, Kherson province. From 1915 he served as a psalm-reader at the Archangel Michael Church in the village of Slobodzeya, Tiraspol district, Kherson province. He was probably ordained a deacon in 1924. Presumably, in 1933 he was ordained a priest and appointed rector of the Archangel Michael Church in the village of Slobodzeya.
In 1935, Father Stefan was arrested and accused of attempting to cross the state border and carrying out counter-revolutionary activities. He was sentenced to 7 years of corrective labor and sent to the Karlag NKVD.
In 1937, while in the camp, Father Stefan was arrested again on charges of "systematic agitation among prisoners, praising the tsarist regime."
Hieromartyr Alexander Petrovich (or Pavlovich) Aksenov was born in 1886 in the village of Rychkovo, Nikolsky district, Vologda province (now Vokhomsky district, Kostroma region). He graduated from the Vologda Theological Seminary, got married, and from 1917 served as a priest in the church in honor of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in the village of Chernovsko-Nikolayevskoye.
In 1929 he was arrested on charges of "anti-Soviet agitation" and exiled to the North in the Narym region for 3 years.
Priests Stefan Kostogryz and Alexander Aksenov served in different dioceses: Father Stefan served in the Odessa region, and Father Alexander served in the Nizhny Novgorod region of the Vyatka region. Father Alexander was sentenced first to 3 years of exile, then to 10 years in the camps for "keeping sermons of counterrevolutionary content."
In 1937, they both ended up in Karlag in Kazakhstan. Here, one "group case" was opened against the two priests, and they were sentenced to death on charges of systematic counterrevolutionary agitation among prisoners. They were shot together in the 1st Volkovskiy department of Karlag NKVD on September 26, 1937.
