Eleazar di Anzersk

Eleazar of Anzersk, known in Russian as Eleazar Anzersky, was a seventeenth-century Russian Orthodox monk, hermit, and founder of the Holy Trinity Skete on Anzer Island in the Solovetsky archipelago of the White Sea. He is venerated as a saint (prepodobny, or venerable) and wonderworker in the Russian Orthodox Church. According to monastic tradition he was born in Kozelsk, in the western part of the Tsardom of Russia, into a merchant family of the Sviridov line; his father’s name is given as Svirid. No reliable source records the year of his birth. As a young man he left secular life for the Solovetsky Monastery, one of the principal monastic centres of the Russian North. There he received the monastic tonsure from Hegumen Irinarch and the name Eleazar, and he was trained in the communal discipline, liturgical life, and handicrafts of the house, including the copying of books and icon painting.

Seeking a stricter solitude than the large coenobium allowed, Eleazar obtained a blessing to settle on Anzer, a neighbouring island then used only sparsely by Solovki monks for fishing and seasonal labour. Traditional accounts date this withdrawal to about 1616. On Anzer he lived at first as a hermit in great poverty and exposure to the Arctic climate. Disciples gradually joined him. With the favour of Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich a small skete dedicated to the Holy Trinity was organized, a wooden church was built, and the community received land and fishing rights. Eleazar gave the skete a severe rule centred on unceasing prayer, fasting, silence, and manual work. He continued to copy manuscripts and to paint icons, and he is credited with spiritual writings and with counsel given to visitors and correspondents, including members of the Romanov court.

The Anzer skete became a place of retreat for monks who desired a more eremitical life within the Solovetsky orbit. Among those who stayed there was the future Patriarch Nikon, who according to later narratives received the monastic tonsure from Eleazar in the 1630s before moving on to the Kozheozersky Monastery. Relations between the elder and Nikon were not without later tension over the status and property of the skete. Eleazar remained in correspondence with Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich as well as with Mikhail Fyodorovich, and the crown confirmed privileges for the island community. Hagiographical tradition ascribes to Eleazar gifts of spiritual discernment and wonderworking, and portrays him as a stern but sought-after starets of the White Sea monasteries.

Eleazar died on 13 January 1656 and was buried at the Trinity Skete on Anzer Island. Local veneration began after his death; the Russian Orthodox Church commemorates him on 13 January in the Julian calendar (26 January in the civil calendar). He is not associated in the sources with a particular list of patronages of places or professions. The Trinity Skete remained a dependency of Solovki in subsequent centuries. In the twentieth century the Solovetsky Islands were turned into a Soviet prison camp, and monastic buildings on Anzer were ruined or reused; in the post-Soviet period the skete has been revived and Eleazar’s memory restored on the island. Surviving knowledge of his life rests on Solovki monastic tradition, later written lives, and scattered seventeenth-century administrative and royal documents. His baptismal name, the exact year of his birth, and many personal details are not preserved.