New Martyr Symeon Turkin

Symeon (Semyon Yakovlevich) Turkin was a Russian layman executed during the Soviet persecution of the Church in 1937. By the accounts of the Russian new-martyr records, he was born in 1870 in the village of Simbukhovo in the Vereya district of Moscow province, into a peasant family. He completed a rural school, served in the army, and worked in construction, taking contracts to build houses. He is numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and is commemorated on September 10 (September 23 on the civil calendar).

In 1933 Turkin was elected elder (starosta) of the local Dormition church, a lay office responsible for the parish's temporal affairs. During the intensified persecution of 1937, he and the parish priest, Peter Yurkov, were arrested on September 9, 1937 and imprisoned at Mozhaisk. According to the records, the charges rested on the testimony of false witnesses, who accused the two men of anti-Soviet activity, of recruiting supporters, and of conducting religious propaganda.

Both men were sentenced to death and shot on September 23, 1937. They were buried in an unmarked common grave at the Butovo polygon near Moscow, one of the principal execution and burial sites of the Soviet terror, where many thousands were shot in 1937–1938 and where a large number of clergy and laity later glorified as new martyrs perished. Turkin was canonized as a new martyr and confessor of Russia on August 18, 2004 by decision of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. He is also commemorated among the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo.