Nikodim of Anzer

Venerable Nikodim of Anzer († 22 January 1673) was the first disciple of Venerable Eleazar of Anzer and, after him, builder of 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 an account written about 1710 for the Solovki Paterikon. According to the Life of Eleazar, Nikodim was his "first disciple" and a zealous follower of his monastic labours; Eleazar entrusted him with the direction of the skete before his death. In the skete he lived "in a way pleasing to God" for forty-⁠three years. He received tonsure in 1630; from 1635 survives one of his first gifts, an altar Gospel. At the end of his life he gave the church an old book, a Festal Menaion left to him by Eleazar, written in 1493 at the order of Abbot Dosithei and bought in 1632 by Eleazar at Solovki.

After Eleazar's death he was builder of the skete for seventeen years (1656-1673). In memory of Eleazar he built a chapel, for which he carved with his own hands figures of seraphim and cherubim. In 1656 he went to Moscow, where Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich received him in audience and gave him a charter for the direction of the skete. Wrong dates in some works (1677 or 1667) place his end in another year; the true year of death, 1673, follows from the account and from a case file on the support the elders of Anzer gave to the rebellious brotherhood of Solovki during the siege of 1667-1676; at that time the skete was led by his successor, the builder Hilarion. He must not be confused with the elder Nikodim Kazanets, typikarios of the Solovki Monastery, who was older and close to Eleazar.

His memory was kept in the skete, together with that of another disciple of Eleazar, the young Nikifor. Their graves were in the same chapel as the elder's, on either side of his shrine. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the monk Macarius, compiler of the skete's Book of Gifts, called him "blessed." Holy Martyr Nikodim Kononov entered him about 1900 in the "Diptych of the Ascetics of Solovki." His name has not, however, entered the Synaxis of the Solovki Saints.