Martyr Theodore (Ivanov): “Don’t cry for me and don’t look for me!”translated

Archimandrite Damascene ORLOVSKY

A stretcher was brought. An NKVD officer approached and said:

- Well, let's put it down.

And he asked Fyodor in a low voice:

- How can we take you?

“And you make your hands like this,” he showed, “into a lock, and throw them over my head.” And let the second one hold your legs.

Fyodor’s legs did not bend, they were like sticks, but they did not lose sensitivity.

One of them grabbed him by the legs, but, immediately feeling the enormous strength of the ascetic, he screamed in fear and threw Fedor. Eulalia ran up, grabbed her brother’s legs and shouted at them:

- Monsters! What do you do with a sick person? What kind of rush are you in?

“Don’t worry,” Fyodor said lovingly and comfortingly, “it’s bad for you to worry.”

Finally they put him on a stretcher. He prayed and said:

- My dears, mommy and sister, don’t wait for me and don’t bother; They won’t tell you the truth anyway. Pray. Don't cry for me and don't look for me!

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Martyr Theodore was born on February 13, 1895 in the city of Tobolsk, Tobolsk province (now the Tyumen region - Ed.) in the family of philistines Mikhail Vasilyevich Ivanov and his wife Elizaveta Alekseevna, née Perevalova, and on February 17 he was baptized in Mikhailo-Arkhangelsk...