Arseny of Konevsky

Saint Arseny of Konevsky, also known as Arsenius of Konevets, was a Russian Orthodox monastic saint of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the founder of the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos on Konevets Island in Lake Ladoga. Surviving sources do not record the year of his birth. He is described as a native of Novgorod, then the political and ecclesiastical centre of the Novgorod Republic. He received the monastic tonsure at the Lisitsky Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos near Novgorod, a house belonging to the Novgorodian monastic world of that era, and lived there before seeking a stricter ascetic life abroad.

Desiring a more rigorous form of monasticism, Arseny travelled to Mount Athos and remained there for three years. Hagiographical accounts state that an Athonite abbot gave him an icon of the Mother of God, afterwards called the Konevskaya Icon of the Theotokos, in which the Christ Child is shown holding a dove. About 1393 he returned to Novgorod and received the blessing of Archbishop John of Novgorod to found a monastery. He settled on Konevets Island on Lake Ladoga. Local Finnic inhabitants had used the island for pagan rites centred on a large boulder known as the Horse-Stone (Kon-kamen), to which horses were offered. According to the traditional Life, Arseny, by prayer and the sprinkling of holy water, drove away the spirits associated with the stone and dedicated the island to Christian worship.

He built a church in honour of the Nativity of the Theotokos and gathered a monastic brotherhood. The community became a spiritual centre on the northern lake frontier and had contact with both Slavic and Karelian populations along the shores of Ladoga. In 1421 a flood is reported to have inundated the original site of the monastery, after which the brethren moved to higher ground on the same island. Arseny continued as igumen of the house through these years and until the end of his life.

He died on 12 June 1447 and was buried at the monastery he had founded. Local veneration followed, and the Russian Orthodox Church entered his name in its liturgical calendars. His principal feast is kept on 12 June. Later tradition related that his relics were uncovered in the sixteenth century during building work at the monastery. The Konevskaya Icon associated with him became a separate object of devotion. Despite later devastations, including the Swedish occupation of the region in the seventeenth century, when the monks withdrew for a time with the icon, the monastery on Konevets Island remained the chief place connected with his memory.