Anthony of Ardatov

Elder Anthony of Ardatov, also called Anthony of Murom (1762-1861), was an ascetic, seer and healer of the Nizhny Novgorod province, a friend from youth of Saint Seraphim of Sarov. He is venerated by the faithful, without any known synodal canonization.

He was born in 1762 in the village of Voshchikha, in the Murom district of the Vladimir province. As a young man he entered the Sarov Hermitage, where he met the novice Prokhor, the future Saint Seraphim. In 1785 the two were sent to collect alms for the church of Saints Zosima and Sabbatius at Sarov, and set up a cross near the village of Dalneye Davydovo, on the spot where, in 1857, a community for homeless widows and girls was founded, becoming in 1886 the Saint Nicholas convent of Dalnedavydovo. In 1826-1827, on Seraphim's advice, he went to Voronezh, to Saint Anthony, who blessed him for a special ascetic feat: a pilgrimage to Kyiv wearing an iron cap, like that of Saint Pitirim of Tambov. Under its weight he went blind.

From 1827 or 1828 he lived for twenty-⁠three years at Murom, in a small cell in a merchant's garden. News of him spread far, and the future abbess of the Protection Convent at Ardatov, Iustina Sinitsyna, visited him often. In 1850 or 1851 he moved to Ardatov, to the house of a townswoman, Likhutina, who wrote down recollections of him and later passed them to Diveevo Convent. Shortly before his death he received the schema in secret, with the name Arsenios. He kept the fasts strictly and wore chains; he is regarded as a seer and healer.

He died on 15 (27) August 1861. At his request he was buried at the Ardatov convent, beside the church, opposite the side chapel of Saint Theodore Stratelates. With the permission of Bishop Jeremiah his grave became a place of pilgrimage, and the nuns who tended it told of wonders. On the grave stood a cast-⁠iron slab with an iron cross set in it and an unquenchable lamp. After the Revolution of 1917 the convent was closed, and the grave was left on the grounds of a juvenile colony and was covered with earth and then with asphalt.