Anna of Petersburg

The Blessed Anna of Petersburg (Anna Ivanovna Lukashova or Pashkova, named in documents Lashkina) was a maiden of noble birth, a fool for Christ in St Petersburg in the first half of the nineteenth century. She passed to the Lord on 1 July 1853. She was loved by simple people and by the clergy and was known for the gift of foresight. Her grave in the Smolensky cemetery remained for a long time a place of pilgrimage.

Beginnings

Anna Ivanovna came from a cultured family; according to some reports she was the daughter of General Lukashov, according to others she belonged to the old noble Pashkov family and studied at the Imperial Society for the Education of Noble Girls (later the Smolny Institute), from where she would have become a maid of honour to the Empress Catherine II. Her true name is not known for certain, but the testimonies of contemporaries, gathered by Archpriest Evgeny Rakhmanin of the Smolensky cemetery church, say that she came from a noble and educated family.

After graduation she entered society, met and loved a guards officer, who returned her love. While she was preparing for the wedding, the officer unexpectedly changed his plans and married another girl. The blow was so hard that she broke every tie with society and left Petersburg, leaving relatives and friends; for several years nothing was heard of her.

Fool for Christ

She returned to Petersburg as a fool for Christ, in rags, with a staff and a large sack on her back, in which she put the alms she then gave to the poor; when she had no alms she put stones in the sack and carried them. On her head she wore a white cap covered with a calico kerchief tied at the back. She had no fixed dwelling and, like Blessed Xenia, walked all day through the city, especially around Sennaya Square and Gostiny Dvor. Sometimes she went into boarding schools and institutes to talk with the pupils, amazing everyone by the way she spoke German and French. She often slept on Sennaya Square, at the fur merchant Petukhov's or with the priests of the Saviour church on Sennaya, among them Archpriest I. I. Ivanov, Fr Vasily Chulkov, or at the house of the deacon Berezaysky, where she died. Petukhov honoured her much, she was godmother to his children, and he composed the inscription on the grave of the "elderly maiden Anna", preserved to this day.

Gift of foresight

Because she talked much with those around her, it soon became clear that she had the gift of foresight. She said with accuracy who would soon marry. To one girl she tied a pink ribbon around her head, saying that all her life she would be a "pink bud"; the girl understood the words only in old age, after a life as a maiden. In the Alexander Nevsky Lavra she met the young Archimandrite Nathanael, took his blessing and told him he would be a bishop; he was consecrated bishop, vicar of Petersburg, in 1849 and, in thanks, got her, since she had no documents, papers in the name of Anna Lashkina, daughter of a deceased physician, which allowed her to enter a church almshouse near the Volkovo cemetery, then one by the Bolsheokhtinskoe. But she did not get on with the old women, rebuked them sharply and returned to Sennaya Square. To Archpriest Gabriel Mikhailov, who avoided her and mocked her, she said that he would not live more than a week after her death, and so it was: she died on 1 July 1853, he fell ill with cholera the same day and died on 3 July. To a seminary graduate she gave a staff, saying "Take it, you will need it", and much later, when he was made a regimental priest, he understood that a wandering life had been foretold him. To the childless Ivanovs she said that the Lord would soon give them a little girl; a newborn girl was left to them, whom they adopted and named after her. She often gave people a kopeck as a sign of plenty, and a Senate official, Orlov, fallen into poverty, got a good post in a ministry after his wife had received a kopeck and a word of encouragement from a ragged old woman, whom she later learned was Anna Ivanovna.

Death and burial

Before her death she took her shroud, came to the Smolensky cemetery and asked Fr Vasily Lavrov to serve a memorial service for the servant of God Anna, that is for herself, on the spot where she would spread the shroud, and to bury her there, "in the same grave as her mother". She then gave the shroud to the church, for burying the poor. She foresaw that they would ask to bury her elsewhere, but that Fr Lavrov knew the place and would fulfil her request; indeed nuns of a convent, Bishop Nathanael at the Lavra and Bishop Ignatius at Sergiyeva Hermitage wished to bury her with them, but no one dared break her will. The place is marked on the plan of the cemetery of 1900 and on those of 1913 to 1917.

News of her death spread at once through Sennaya Square and the whole city, and hundreds and thousands of people wished to take leave, so the coffin was carried from the cramped dwelling to the Saviour church, where the vigil was kept on 2, 3 and 4 July. On 5 July, the day of the funeral, the crowd was greater still. Archpriest Andrei Okunev officiated. The coffin was carried by thousands to the Smolensky cemetery; at a street corner the procession met another going to Gavan after a moleben for deliverance from cholera, and Bishop Smaragd stopped it, took leave of Anna and proclaimed "Eternal memory". At the cemetery nearly as many people came as on the feast of the Smolensk icon of the Mother of God (forty to fifty thousand).

The grave

In the 1890s it was a simple mound covered with turf, with a stone, an oak cross hung with icons and a lamp; the mound had to be made anew every year, because visitors took the earth as a remedy. At the end of the nineteenth century a lady collected money for a chapel; the grave was renewed and an iron chapel with glass windows was built, then enlarged after five years. Inside were placed a large icon of the Crucifixion, icons of the Resurrection and of Saint Nicholas and an unquenched lamp, and old women watched over the chapel and sold candles and icons. After the Revolution of 1917 the cemetery was taken by the authorities, and the chapel was leased in 1919 by Archpriest Alexei Zapadalov and thirty-⁠nine parishioners of the Tikhonite community. From 1922 the Renovationists seized the churches of the cemetery, but the old believers could still hold memorial services there until the middle of the 1930s. The chapel still existed in 1935 and perhaps even in 1951, when it was said that beside the chapel of Blessed Xenia another, of "Blessed Anna", had been adorned, where memorial services were held.

Fr Stefan Opatovich, in two articles of 1873 and 1875, says that people take earth from the grave as a remedy, adding that "of miracles nothing is yet heard". Archpriest Evgeny Rakhmanin recorded two cases of miraculous help: among them, the healing of a little girl who, because of her father's unbelief, had not been able to stand on her feet, and to whom there appeared in a dream a dirty, ragged old woman with a staff, speaking sternly but with a kind face, asking her to enlighten her unbelieving father.