Iov Anzersky

Saint Job of Anzer, known in Russian as Iov Anzersky and in the great schema as Jesus (Iisus), was a Russian Orthodox hieromonk and desert-dweller connected with the Solovetsky Monastery and Anzer Island in the White Sea. He was born in Moscow in the 1630s, in the Tsardom of Russia, and in secular life bore the name John. He served as a parish priest in Moscow. According to the received monastic life, he was married; after his wife’s death he left the world and entered the Solovetsky Monastery, where he received the monastic tonsure with the name Job. An exact year of birth is not firmly documented in independent historical records and is usually given only approximately in hagiographic sources.

At Solovki he spent many years in ordinary monastic obediences and acquired a reputation for humility, prayer, and austerity. In the early eighteenth century he was appointed builder, or superior, of the Holy Trinity Skete on Anzer Island, a dependency of the Solovetsky Monastery associated with the earlier labors of Saint Eleazar of Anzer. The skete had declined, and Job worked to restore its liturgical and ascetic life. The traditional account of his life states that the Mother of God appeared to him and commanded that a new settlement be founded on a hill of the island called Golgotha, with a church dedicated to the Crucifixion of the Lord.

Obeying that vision, he established the Golgotha-Crucifixion Skete in the mid-1710s. In 1710 he was clothed in the great schema and given the uncommon schema-name Jesus. He passed his remaining years at the Golgotha skete, combining the practical duties of a skete-builder with a strict hesychastic rule. He died on 6 March 1720 on Anzer Island and was buried at the Golgotha-Crucifixion Skete. Later monastic tradition reported that his relics were found incorrupt.

He came to be venerated among the saints of Solovki. The Russian Orthodox Church commemorates him on 6 March (Julian calendar) and in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Solovetsky Monastery. He is remembered as a restorer of Anzer monasticism and as the founder of the Golgotha skete. Surviving information about him is drawn chiefly from Orthodox hagiography and monastery tradition rather than from a large body of secular documentation, so details of his early life remain limited.