Gelasius of Novgorod

Holy Venerable Martyr Gelasius of Novgorod was abbot of the Antoniev Monastery in hard times for Novgorod, in the sixties and seventies of the sixteenth century. Scarcely had the plague epidemic ceased in 1567 when in 1569 a very great crop failure came and famine. People died. Those who could fled the city to lands where they could feed themselves; those who remained faded slowly from hunger. Then, into the emptying city, came Ivan the Terrible with the oprichniki.

The abbots, hieromonks, hierodeacons and cathedral elders of all the monasteries of Novgorod, about five hundred in number, were brought into the city and set at the pravezh, that is, beating. Then, after the reprisal against Archbishop Pimen and the boyars, the tsar ordered all those standing at the pravezh to be beaten to death with clubs and the bodies to be carried to their monasteries. So was killed the abbot of the Antoniev Monastery, Gelasius, and with him twenty brethren. But even with this the sorrows of the monasteries did not end. As the chronicler says, after the judgment of the other Novgorodians, Ivan the Terrible, with his military men, began to go about Great Novgorod to the monasteries and ordered the treasuries of the churches and monasteries, the cells and service buildings to be plundered. Plundering the monastery of Saint Anthony, he did not stop even before its holy treasures: the vessels of the venerable one, brought miraculously to Novgorod for the building of the monastery, the tsar carried off to Moscow.

After the oprichnina's devastation the monastery of Venerable Anthony stood in desolation, without any service. Venerable Gelasius is commemorated on 11 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod, a movable day.