On May 16, the fourth week after Pascha, the Church marks the Day of remembrance of the Synaxis of New Martyrs of Butovo.

It is a movable holiday added to the Russian Orthodox Church’s calendar with the blessing of His Holiness Patriarch Alexiy II of Russia on September 3, 2003.

The shooting range in Butovo presently located within the city limits in Moscow is a mass burial site of the victims of repressions executed between the 1930s and 1950s.

Currently, there are about one thousand names of people executed for confession of Orthodox faith at the Butovo shooting range.  There is no other place anywhere else in Russia to hold relics of such numerous Synaxis of saints.

Among those executed is the Holy Hieromartyr Seraphim (Chichagov), one of the principal organizers of the canonization of Venerable Seraphim of Sarov and the chronicler of the Diveyevo monastery.

Leonid Mikhailovich Chichagov was a man of many talents, a highly gifted military man and a physician, a preacher and a theologian, spiritual writer and historian, an artist, and a musician. But “having loved the heavenly host of the King of Heaven more than of earthly princes,” he, an illustrious officer highly decorated with many Russian and foreign awards, chose to retire after having received the blessing of Protopresbyter St. John of Kronstadt and became a priest in 1893.

After his wife died, Father Leonid was tonsured a monk with the name of Seraphim in 1898. A year later, he was elevated to the rank of Archimandrite and ended his earthly life in the rank of Metropolitan.

The “Chronicle of the Seraphim-Diveyevo monastery” written by the Metropolitan Seraphim had a tremendous impact on the process of glorification of Venerable Seraphim of Sarov.

On December 11, 1937, His Eminence, aged 81 at the time, was executed at the NKVD’s shooting range in Butovo.