Anthony of Siya

Venerable Anthony of Siya was a monk and priest in northern Russia and the founder of the Antonievo-⁠Siysky Monastery on the Siya River, in what is now Arkhangelsk Oblast. He reposed in 1556 and is commemorated on 7 December, by the Julian calendar. He has been called the last great monastic saint of old Russia.

Early life

He was born in 1477 or 1478 in the village of Kekhta near the Northern Dvina, into a well-⁠off peasant family, and at baptism was named Andrew. He was educated and learned icon painting. After the death of his parents he went to Novgorod and served a local boyar for five years. He married, but his wife died a year later. Then he resolved to enter a monastery.

Monastic life

He gave away his possessions and came to the river Kena, to the hermitage of Pachomius, where he was tonsured with the name Anthony. Later he was ordained hieromonk. He is said to have been a model of humility and obedience, to have kept a strict fast, and to have kept the thought of death and the last judgment always before him.

Loving stillness, he left the hermitage with two monks and settled on the river Sheleksa, at the Black Rapids. He lived there seven years, until the local people drove him out. With seven disciples he then settled on Great Mikhailovo Lake, along the Siya. There in 1520 he built a chapel, from which the Siya monastery grew. He obtained permission from Vasily III to build the monastery on state land. Anthony became its first abbot, but several times left it in search of solitude. The monastery stood under the care of the archbishop of Novgorod.

Repose and veneration

He reposed in 1556, in his seventy-⁠ninth year. His disciple, the monk Philotheus, wrote the first version of his Life, from which the monk Jonah and Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich composed later ones, Jonah's in 1578. Abbot Pitirim and Philotheus petitioned for his canonization in Moscow in 1579, and in 1610 he was recognised as a saint of national importance. His relics rest in his monastery on the Siya.