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Name & Status

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Biography

Short Description

Saint Anthony of Siya, whose secular name was Andrei, is a Russian Orthodox monastic saint of the sixteenth century associated with the spread of cenobitic monasticism in the Russian North. Traditional accounts drawn from a monastic Life composed in the decades after his death place his birth in 1478 in the village of Kekhta in the Kholmogory district on the Northern Dvina. His parents were pious peasants of sufficient means to have him taught to read. After their death he spent several years in Novgorod in the service of a local boyar. Hagiography records that he subsequently married and that his wife and children died, after which he distributed his property and sought the monastic life.

He received the tonsure with the name Anthony at the Monastery of St. Pachomius on the Ken River. Desiring a stricter solitude, he left that house with a few companions and, after wandering the forests of the Dvina land, settled about 1520 on Mikhailov Island in a lake of the Siya River system. The hermitage he established there grew into the Holy Trinity Antonievo-Siysky Monastery, of which he became the first igumen. He organized a common-life community, oversaw the building of churches and cells, and had a canal dug to connect the surrounding lakes.

Anthony was known in his lifetime for humility, manual labour, and a reputation as a starets and wonderworker; he refused to have his likeness painted from life. The monastery attracted patronage from Muscovite rulers, including Ivan IV, and developed into an important northern centre of manuscript copying, liturgy and icon painting. He remained at the house until his death on 7 December 1556.

Local veneration began soon after his repose; his relics were later uncovered and described as incorrupt. He was glorified as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church and is commemorated on 7 December. Nearly all particulars of his early family life and the precise chronology of his wanderings rest on hagiographical tradition rather than independent contemporary records, and should be read with the caution appropriate to sixteenth-century northern Russian monastic sources.

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