At least three generations of my family: the cousins ​​of my great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, their parents and grandfathers, were all church officials. Most of them were repressed. This tradition was interrupted. My grandmother hasn't told anything about her father, but I never asked. 
I can't remember how I've learned about him. Perhaps it was when I first saw an album with old family photographs. On most photos people were dressed in clergy. The images imprinted into my mind. Many years later 
I found that album, but it was almost empty. My quest began.

When I was a child, and my grandmother was an elderly woman, she was constantly drawn to the same place - Nikola Ez. We went there several times with her and our relatives. All that remained there was a dilapidated temple, where my great-grandfather had served, and a cemetery nearby. At the place where once was a pier, below the Volga, there was a barge moored to the shore. She wandered around the church, remembered and probably saw something we would never be able to reach.

My great-grandfather, Alexei Nikolayevich Potekhin, was arrested on January 7, 1938, sentenced by the "troika" to the death penalty and executed in 4 days. By this time he had already left the family so as not to endanger anyone. I wanted to get closer to my great-grandfather somehow, to the history of the family, to find and feel the connection with them, so I went to Nikola Ez - the place where my grandmother was born. I saw that now there is almost nothing left. In some places you can see basements of houses - a children's camp was built on this place in Soviet times, and nothing has remained from village houses. Trees sprout through the walls of the temple. The forest grows where the family house was and in the district where people lived. Job 8:13-14 "Such is the destiny of all who forget God; so the hope of the godless will perish. His confidence is fragile; his security is in a spider’s web."