Anthony Monkin

Blessed Anthony Monkin was a fool for Christ at Zadonsk and an Orthodox ascetic of the nineteenth century. The sources do not say that he was canonized by the Orthodox Church; they call him only an ascetic and a fool for Christ, and believers visit his grave.

He was born in the village of Klenovoe, near Zadonsk, to a peasant family, around the year 1730. At the age of seven, during a storm, he vanished from home and was found three weeks later in a field by a stream, where all that time he had fed on the peas growing on the bank. To questions about how he had come there he kept silent or answered something unrelated. From that day began his life as a fool for Christ. He lost his father early, his mother married again, but his stepfather treated him badly, set him heavy work, beat him, and after his mother's death drove him from the house. At first he lived with his nephew and spent much time in the forest or at the Zadonsk monastery of the Presentation of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God. Without taking monastic vows he began to live as an ascetic, marked by humility and renunciation of possessions. Even in his lifetime popular report ascribed to him foresight and wonderworking.

In his last years, according to a nineteenth-⁠century portrait, Anthony Alekseevich was a stooped, thin little old man, dressed in peasant clothing. A year before his death he settled with the Oryol landowner A. V. Demidova, who had bought a house in Zadonsk. Two weeks before his death he fell ill, received communion and departed to the Lord in 1851, according to tradition at the age of about one hundred and twenty.

He was buried in the Nativity of the Mother of God monastery at Zadonsk, under the altar of the Ascension church, in the same crypt as other well-⁠known ascetics of Zadonsk. Until the 1920s memorial services were often served at his grave, and the monastery chronicle records many cases of help and intercession by Anthony. After the monastery was closed in the 1920s, the remains of Anthony Monkin and the other ascetics of Zadonsk were moved to the Tyunino cemetery of Zadonsk. In 1993 their burial was found and, with the blessing of Metropolitan Methodius (Nemtsov), they were brought back to the Zadonsk monastery and placed in a crypt beside the relics of Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk.