New Hieromartyr Sergius of Narva

Sergius (Druzhinin) was Bishop of Narva, a vicariate of the Petrograd (Leningrad) diocese, who died during the Soviet persecution of the Church in 1937. Born Ivan Prokhorovich Druzhinin on June 20, 1863, in a village of Bezhetsk County in the Tver province, he spent many years in monastic life before his episcopal consecration. He is venerated as a New Hieromartyr and is numbered among the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, with his commemoration on September 4.

His monastic service spanned several of the great houses of the Russian north: by tradition he was associated with Valaam Monastery and the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, and for a longer period with the Trinity-Sergius Hermitage near St. Petersburg, where from 1915 to 1919 he served as prior with the rank of archimandrite. On November 10 (23), 1924, he was consecrated Bishop of Narva by Patriarch Tikhon, serving as a vicar of the Petrograd diocese.

In the ecclesiastical disputes that followed the 1927 declaration of loyalty to the Soviet state issued by Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), Bishop Sergius became one of the leading figures of the Josephite (iosiflyansky) movement, which broke communion with the Deputy Patriarchal Locum Tenens. Together with Bishop Demetrius (Lyubimov) of Gdov he signed an act of separation on December 13 (26), 1927, and according to the sources he came to effectively head this movement after Demetrius's arrest. He was himself arrested, held for some five years in the Yaroslavl prison, and then exiled to the Mari ASSR, where in 1937 he was put to death under sentence of the Soviet authorities.