19th–20th century
Saint Philosophos Ornatsky and His Sons
A Russian priest with enormous charitable work, executed together with his two sons by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
Biography
Philosophos Ornatsky graduated from the theological academy of Saint Petersburg in 1885, married, and was ordained a priest, developing enormous charitable and missionary work and forming a spiritual bond with the future Patriarch Tikhon. In the First World War he stood by wounded soldiers and their families, while his two sons, Nicholas and Boris, fought heroically at the front.
After the 1917 revolution, he was arrested together with his two sons by the Soviet security forces on 9 August 1918 and taken to the prisons of Kronstadt, where all three were executed by firing squad, bearing witness to their faith.