After explicit videos allegedly filmed inside an active Orthodox church spread widely on social media, police officers visited the Church of Saints Timothy the Apostle and Tatiana in Nizhny Novgorod on August 19, 2025. According to the source, they are considering whether to open a criminal case.
The publication says the footage shows the church interior, the iconostasis, and liturgical books. According to its account, the makers of the videos deliberately shifted the viewer’s focus from the participants to the church setting, emphasizing where the scenes were recorded.
The source identifies the location as the Church of Saint Timothy the Apostle and Martyr Tatiana, part of the Nizhny Novgorod diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church. The church occupies part of a large building opposite the city’s first municipal hospital, while another section of the same building houses an Orthodox school.
The people shown in the videos may have been students of the Nizhny Novgorod Theological Seminary, the article says. It also reports that the original files carried the watermark of a foreign pornographic website, which the author says may suggest commercial distribution.
The article separately notes that the recordings were made no later than 2023. At that time, in addition to specialized websites, they were allegedly posted in a restricted Telegram channel focused on leaked explicit photos and videos involving church-affiliated people.
According to the publication, that Telegram channel has a relatively small audience of about 2,700 subscribers. The videos reached a much broader audience later, after blogger Alexander Nevzorov, who has a multimillion following, drew attention to them.