Anthony of Novgorod

Anthony of Novgorod, whose secular name was Dobrynya Yadreykovich (also rendered Dobrynia Jadrejkovich or Dobrynya Yadreikovich), was an archbishop of Novgorod and the author of a celebrated Old Russian pilgrimage account. He came from Novgorod, where his family appears to have been of some standing; the patronymic Yadreykovich indicates that his father was called Yadreyko. Toward the end of the twelfth century he undertook a journey to Constantinople, the New Rome of the Orthodox world. The visit is generally dated about 1200, a few years before the Fourth Crusade stormed the city in April 1204. In Constantinople he moved among the great churches, above all Hagia Sophia, and among monasteries and relic shrines, observing both the buildings and the ceremonial life of the Byzantine church.

He later set down what he had seen in a work known as the Kniga Palomnik, or Book of the Pilgrim. The text lists churches and the relics they housed—fragments of the True Cross, instruments of the Passion, bodies and body-parts of apostles and martyrs, and wonder-working icons—and it notes liturgical customs that struck a visitor from Rus'. Because the Latin sack of 1204 scattered or destroyed many of those objects and damaged the sacred topography of the capital, Anthony's inventory is often the last or the fullest description of a given shrine in its Byzantine setting. Philologists and historians of art and liturgy have used the Kniga Palomnik as a primary source for Constantinopolitan church life at the close of the twelfth century and for the religious imagination of pre-Mongol Rus'. Manuscripts of the work continued to be copied in Russian lands long after his death.

After returning from the Mediterranean he took monastic vows under the name Anthony and was associated with the Khutyn Monastery, north of Novgorod, which had been founded by St. Varlaam of Khutyn. In 1210, when Archbishop Mitrofan was driven from the city, the Novgorodians chose Anthony as their archbishop, and he received consecration from the metropolitan of Kiev. The Novgorod archbishopric was one of the most important sees in Rus', richly endowed and closely tied to the self-governing republic's identity, but it was also exposed to the struggles of the veche and of rival princes. Chronicle tradition records a troubled episcopate. In 1218 Mitrofan returned from exile and Anthony was removed; he is said to have occupied for a time the see of Peremyshl in southwestern Rus'. After Mitrofan died, Anthony came back to Novgorod. In the 1220s conflict resumed. Arsenius was installed in his place; Anthony retired to Khutyn. Popular anger during famine and other disasters around 1228 briefly restored Anthony, who was by then elderly and in poor health, but he did not remain in office. Arsenius returned, and Anthony spent his remaining years in the monastery.

He died at Khutyn in 1232 and was buried there. His life illustrates three interlocking themes of his age: the still-living traffic of pilgrims and ideas between Rus' and Byzantium on the eve of Constantinople's fall to the Latins; the distinctive, often turbulent church order of the Novgorod Republic, in which an archbishop could be installed and deposed by civic power; and the monastic network, centered on houses such as Khutyn, that formed the spiritual and sometimes political retreat of Novgorodian hierarchs. Later generations valued him chiefly as the author of the Pilgrim's Book rather than as a thaumaturge with a large independent cult, although he belongs to the wider memory of Novgorod's medieval hierarchs. The Mongol invasion of Rus', which began in the later 1230s, lay just beyond his lifetime; his writings therefore belong to the last generation of the pre-Mongol church in the north.