Matrona of Anemnyasevo

Saint Matrona of Anemnyasevo (in the world Matrona, Matryosha, Grigoryevna Belyakova), a fool for Christ, was born on 6 (18) November 1864 in the village of Anemnyasevo, in the Kasimov district of the Ryazan province, and fell asleep on 16 July (29 July on the new calendar) 1936 at Moscow. She was glorified in 1999 as a locally venerated saint of the diocese of Ryazan, and in 2000, at the Jubilee Council of Bishops, for veneration throughout the Church. She is remembered on 16 July.

Childhood and injury

Her family was counted the poorest in the village, and her father was a drunkard. At about seven, Matryosha fell ill with smallpox. Her parents did not treat her and, after the illness, she went blind. Her duty was to care for her younger brothers and sisters. Once, left with a little sister, the blind girl dropped the child from the porch. Frightened, she wept and ran after her. Her mother, who was passing, saw what had happened and began to beat the blind girl, very hard and for a long time. Losing consciousness, the girl saw the Queen of Heaven. She told her mother, but she beat her still harder. Three times during the beating Matryosha saw the Queen, who said some words to her, but Matrona told the secret of those words to no one until the end of her life. After the cruel beating by her mother, the blind girl, maimed, could no longer walk. She was left unable to move and lay, never rising from her bed, until death.

The blessed one of Anemnyasevo

Seventeen years she lay in her parents' house, finding comfort only in prayer. Once a sick peasant came to her, asking her to heal his back. Matryosha held her hand on his back and the pains ceased. From then people began to come to her with their needs and illnesses. Soon Matryosha moved with her sister, Darya, to a small house made specially for her by good people. But her sister saw her only as a source of income and demanded that she take as many gifts as possible. Matryosha was forced to move again, this time to her nephew, a very devout and kind man. Her spiritual father was Alexander Orlov, canonized in 2000 as a holy confessor.

Though grown, Matryosha looked like a child, as if from the time she received the terrible injury, at ten, she had not grown. In the summer of 1935 the Belkovo district section of the NKVD opened a criminal case against the "priests Pravdolyubov and the sick freak Matryona Belyakova", for anti-⁠Soviet and anti-⁠collective-⁠farm agitation. The Special Council of the NKVD decided, on 2 August 1935, to send her "to compulsory treatment".

Her repose and grave

The blessed Matrona died of heart failure on 16 July 1936, in the home for the chronically ill in Moscow, and was buried in the Vladykino cemetery. In the 1970s, with the building of a highway beside the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in Vladykino, a few graves near the walls of the church had to be moved. Her remains were moved to the Dolgoprudny cemetery, but for a long time the exact place of burial was not known. In the early 2000s the granddaughter of Priest Boris Kondratiev, who had buried her in 1936 at the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in Vladykino, came to the head of the Dolgoprudny cemetery and said that her grandfather, buried in 1955 at Vladykino, was moved in the 1970s to the same plot (no. 129) of the old part of the Dolgoprudny cemetery where the blessed Matrona lies, her grave being near her grandfather's. This helped to find the exact place. It has been decided to build a chapel in her memory in the old part of the cemetery.