Nikifor of Anzer

Venerable Nikifor of Anzer (c. 1635) was a young monk, a disciple of Venerable Eleazar of Anzer, in the Holy Trinity Skete on the island of Anzer, belonging to the Solovki Monastery. He is commemorated as venerable in the memory of the Solovki community, without synodal canonization; his name has not been entered in the Synaxis of the Solovki Saints.

He is spoken of in the Life of Venerable Eleazar, composed about 1704, and in the "Brief Account of the Builder Eleazar of the Anzer Skete and of Other Ascetics," written about 1710 for the Solovki Paterikon. His life was short but spiritually rich. He came from a rich family of Novgorod. Very young, probably at the beginning of the 1630s, he came to Solovki, passed through the obedience of a novice, was tonsured a monk and given to Venerable Eleazar for instruction. He settled in the Anzer Skete and, under Eleazar's spiritual guidance, "served the Lord with great warmth." At Anzer he stayed only three years and passed to the Lord, by the most likely reckoning about 1635, the year in which a memorial gift appears for "Nikifor the Novgorodian," made by the typikarios Gelasius. The Life of Eleazar tells that the elder asked God to learn the fate of his disciple after death and received the announcement that he had "inherited the lot of the righteous."

Nikifor was buried in the same chapel as his teacher and another disciple, Nikodim, on the right and left of the shrine of Venerable Eleazar; his name and Nikodim's were spoken at the memorial services at the latter's shrine. His memory vanished from the Solovki Paterikon of 1873, where the editor shortened the account of Eleazar's disciples and mentioned only Nikodim. Hieromonk Nikodim Kononov put his name and Nikodim's in the "Diptych of the Ascetics of Solovki" (1900). They did not, however, enter the Synaxis of the Solovki Saints, founded in 1993. Nikifor remains among the "ascetics unseen by the world," whose memory is kept only in the Solovki monastery.