Anthony of Chernoezersk

Venerable Anthony of Chernoezersk founded the Nativity of the Mother of God monastery on the Black Lake in the Novgorod lands, forty versts north-⁠east of Cherepovets, on an island of the Shchirsk district. Presumably in the sixteenth century he came to the shore of one of the Black Lakes and built a church there; this began the monastery. He died in 1598 in his hermitage, and his relics lay beneath a stone behind the right choir of the wooden church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, built in 1839 on the site of the old chapel.

The monastery was twice destroyed to its foundations: in 1581 by the Lithuanians and in 1682 by the Swedes, and in 1764 it was closed. Anthony is commemorated on 17 January (new style), the day of Venerable Anthony the Great, whose name he bears. The time of his local canonization is unknown; his veneration is shown by the inclusion of his name in the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod, established around 1875, and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vologda (1841).