Alexei Mechev was a Moscow parish priest venerated as a saint while he was still alive. His parish on Maroseika Street was an oasis of warmth in a city that, in the early twentieth century, seethed with revolutions and catastrophes.
He was born in Moscow in 1859, the son of a church choir director, and was ordained in 1884. The first eight years of his priesthood brought misfortune after misfortune — the death of his wife, four children, poverty. St. John of Kronstadt once visited him and said, "Now you will be our Moscow batiushka."
Everyone came to him: intellectuals, ordinary people, doubters, sufferers. He did not lecture. He was simply there, and he heard each person out. People said of him, "Batiushka loves everyone — and receives everyone."
He died in 1923. His son Sergei carried on the ministry in the same parish until his arrest and execution in 1942. In 2000 Alexei Mechev was canonized. His relics rest in the Church of St. Nicholas in Klenniki, on Maroseika.