Anthony of Rome

Anthony of Rome, known in the Russian tradition as Antoniy Rimlyanin, was a monastic founder active in Novgorod in the early twelfth century and is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The principal narrative source for his life is a hagiographical vita composed in the sixteenth century by Nifont, a monk of the Antoniev Monastery. According to that account he was born in Rome in 1067 to wealthy parents whom the text describes as remaining faithful to Eastern Orthodoxy. After their death he distributed his property, received the monastic tonsure, and lived as an ascetic. The vita relates that he took up residence on a large rock by the seashore; in 1106 a storm detached the rock, which then floated across the sea and along the waterways of Rus', coming to rest on the bank of the Volkhov River near Novgorod on the eve of the Nativity of the Theotokos.

Bishop Nikita of Novgorod is said to have received him and to have blessed the establishment of a monastery at the landing place. Anthony became the first abbot of the Monastery of the Nativity of the Mother of God, later called the Antoniev Monastery. Independent of the later vita, the Novgorod chronicles record that work on a stone church at Anthony's monastery began in 1117 and that the church was completed in 1119, naming Anthony as its builder. Those notices confirm that a monastic community under his leadership existed in the second decade of the twelfth century and that it possessed sufficient resources to undertake masonry construction, still relatively uncommon in Novgorod at that date. He remained abbot of the house for the rest of his life.

The traditional date of his death is 3 August 1147. He was buried in the monastery church. In 1597 his relics were uncovered, an event that prompted wider liturgical commemoration. He is remembered on 3 August, the day of his repose, and on 17 January, the day of the uncovering of the relics. Icons frequently show him standing on the floating rock, a motif taken directly from the vita. The monastery he founded remained an important Novgorodian house in later centuries.

Modern historians treat the Roman birth, the claim of an Orthodox family in eleventh-century Rome, and the voyage on the rock as legendary elements typical of sixteenth-century Muscovite hagiography rather than as recoverable historical fact. No contemporary Western or Novgorodian source corroborates an Italian origin, and the assertion that his parents were Orthodox in papal Rome is anachronistic. The epithet "the Roman" may preserve a memory of foreign, possibly Latin, background, or it may have been attached later to enhance the monastery's prestige. What can be affirmed with reasonable confidence is that a monk named Anthony founded and ruled a monastery on the Volkhov in the early 1100s, that the community was able to build in stone within his lifetime, and that his memory was cultivated at the monastery until it received broader official recognition at the end of the sixteenth century.