St Sophrony of Essex remembered 130 years after his birth
Aurelian Iftimiu
St Sophrony the Athonite was born in Moscow on 22 September 1896 and was baptised Sergei Semyonovich Sakharov. He studied Fine Arts in Moscow, searching for an ideal of beauty that transcended the purely aesthetic. During the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, he was arrested twice and imprisoned at the Lubyanka, but in 1921 he managed…
