Gavriil and Anastasia of Vasilev

The righteous Gabriel and his sister Anastasia of Vasilev are two locally venerated saints, named in the old sources "wonderworkers of Vasilev." They are commemorated on 26 May. The place and time of their labours cannot be established with certainty.

The "Description of the Russian Saints" (copies of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) says: "The holy and righteous Gabriel and the holy and righteous Anastasia, who was his sister in the flesh, wonderworkers of Vasilev." In some copies the time of their life is fixed conventionally at the year 7000 (1492). From "old handwritten calendars" they are mentioned as prince and princess of "the town of Vasilev" in the calendar and "Alphabet" of the Old Believer monk Jonah Kerzhensky (1807-1811). Archbishop Demetrius Sambikin supposed that "the town of Vasilev" was Vasilsursk (Vasil, 170 km from Nizhny Novgorod), founded on 1 September 1523 in the expedition of Grand Prince Vasily III against Kazan. If the supposition is correct, they lived roughly between the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the next. From their mention in the "Description" and in the "Icon Painters' Manual," by the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century a local veneration already existed.

Their appearance is described on 26 May in several iconographic manuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: "Gabriel, grey-⁠haired, in the schema, a beard like the Theologian's, in venerable vestments; Anastasia like Saint Paraskeva," and a manual of the 1820s adds for Anastasia: "a white kerchief on her head, a vermilion robe, azure beneath, hands in prayer." The images have not survived. A bust of Anastasia, in a nun's dress and cowl, with the name "Venerable Anastasia of Vasilev," is placed in a group of venerable and righteous women, between Venerable Anna of Kashin and the righteous Juliana of Murom, on a copy of the icon of the Synaxis of Russian Saints of 1814, kept at the museum of the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy.