Memorial plaque to St. Maria (Skobtsova) unveiled in Yalta

Yalta, Crimea, October 3, 2018

Photo: cerkov-ru.eu Photo: cerkov-ru.eu
    

On September 27, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, a memorial plaque in honor of St. Maria (Skobtsova) of Paris was unveiled on the façade of Chekhov High School in Yalta, Crimea.

There was a girl’s high school in the building before the Russian revolution, where Liza Pilenko, later to be known to the world as the martyr Mother Maria of Paris, studied in her youth, reports the site of the Korsun Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The plaque reads: “Elizaveta Yurievna Pilenko (Kuzmina-Karavaeva, Skobtsova, Mother Maria in monasticism), a writer, theologian, philanthropist, member of the French Resistance, and righteous among the nations studied here in the Yalta Girls’ School in 1905-1906. She died in 1945 in a gas chamber in Ravensbrück.”

The unveiling ceremony was attended by the rector of the St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral Archpriest Adam, the Deputy Chairman of the Yalta City Council, the Director of the State Historical and Archaeological Museum, the head of the Noble Assembly of Crimea, and members of the public and the school.

“The name of Mother Maria is connected with the glorious pages of history of our Fatherland,” said the leader of the Noble Assembly of Crimea A. K. Ushakov, who initiated the installation of the memorial plaque and allocated funds for its production and the publishing of a book about St. Maria.

The book The Return of Holy Maria to Crimea by K. I. Krivoshena was also presented during the ceremony for the unveiling of the plaque.

Ushakov also noted that his organization is taking the initiative to return Voikov Street, named for Pyotr Voikov, who participated in the assassination of the Royal Martyrs, where the school is located, to its historical name of School Street.

There is also a street in Paris named in her honor that was inaugurated on March 31, 2016.

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Photo: drevo-Info.ru Photo: drevo-Info.ru
Mother Maria (Skobtsova, 1891-1945) was a nun of the Western European Russian Exarchate of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. As the new plaque reads, she was a poet, theologian, iconographer, and member of the French Resistance.

She was arrested by the Paris Gestapo in 1943 and died in a labor camp in Ravensbrück in March 1945. According to tradition, she voluntarily entered the gas chamber in place of someone else, saving that person’s life.

She was canonized as a Nun-Martyr by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 2004.

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10/3/2018

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