Arsenia Sebryakova

Abbess Arsenia (in the world Anna Mikhailovna Sebryakova) was born on 3 July 1833 in the settlement of Sebrovo, in the Ust-⁠Medveditsa district, in the region of the Don Host, and fell asleep on 21 July 1905 at Sarov, on pilgrimage. She was abbess of the Transfiguration monastery at Ust-⁠Medveditsa and an icon painter. She was numbered among the locally venerated saints of the Metropolis of Volgograd on 21 October 2016, by decision of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. She is remembered on 21 July (3 August on the new calendar).

Life

She was born in the family of a landowner, Mikhail Vasilyevich Sebryakov. On 30 December 1850 she came to live at the Transfiguration monastery at Ust-⁠Medveditsa. In 1852 she made a pilgrimage to the Kremenskaya men's monastery, and in the summer of 1853 to Kyiv. In 1854 she was tonsured a rassophore with the name Arsenia, and on 11 January 1859 into the mantle. On 4 May 1862 Bishop John, who governed the diocese of the Don, appointed her treasurer, and on 3 January 1864 she was consecrated abbess, at Novocherkassk. On 25 June 1905 she set out on a pilgrimage to Sarov, where she fell asleep on 21 July. On 2 August 1905 she was buried in the crypt of the church of Saint Arsenius the Great of the monastery.

The school and the cathedral

Her first care as abbess was the spread of reading, for many of the sisters who entered the monastery were entirely illiterate. First she ordered that the illiterate be taught, then she founded a monastery library. In 1867 she opened in the monastery a free girls' school of four classes, teaching the Law of God, the Russian and Church Slavonic languages, geography, arithmetic and Russian history.

In 1871 she asked Archbishop Platon for permission to build a new church in the monastery, and work began on 23 June 1875. By the beginning of 1877 the walls were finished and the dome raised. The building was finished in the summer of 1885, and the church was consecrated on 8 September of the same year by Bishop Mitrophan, in the name of the Kazan icon of the Mother of God. Beneath its vaults, below, a church was made with an altar dedicated to Venerable Arsenius the Great, and on 15 September 1885 a side chapel of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul was consecrated. She rebuilt the monastery completely: new cells, renewed outbuildings, a metochion in the town of Uryupinskaya, with a church, a renewed winter church and a skete of the monastery.

The caves

On 10 July 1874, on the day of Saint Anthony of the Caves, Abbess Arsenia began to dig caves, at night. The caves depict the last days of the earthly life of the Saviour, the Way of the Cross, and the way of the Mother of God to Golgotha. The entrance is in the narthex of the church of Saint Arsenius the Great, and their length is about 165 metres. The main gallery she herself named "the Way of the Cross of the Saviour", and the other, around the first, "the Passion Way of the Mother of God". She dug the caves with her spiritual daughters, the nuns Nikodima, Agnia and Viktorina. She wished to make a cave church there, but did not have time. The temperature in the caves, winter and summer, is about eight degrees above zero. In the 1930s the caves were filled in, but forty years later the local people cleared the entrances. In the caves lies a stone slab, not very large but heavy and hard, on which the deep prints of palms and knees can be seen.

Awards

Abbess Arsenia received a pectoral cross, a cross with precious ornaments given from the cabinet of the emperor, the Red Cross badge for the Russo-⁠Turkish war of 1877 to 1878, the medal in memory of the reign of Alexander III, in 1905 a Bible given by the Synod for the founding of the monastery school, and a pectoral cross with precious ornaments given by the sisters of the monastery, with the leave of the authorities, on the day of the thirtieth anniversary of her leading the monastery.