Venerable Anthony the Roman, Wonderworker of Novgorod (†1147) — August 3 / August 16 (Julian Calendar)

On this day, August 3 according to the Julian Calendar (August 16 civil calendar), the Georgian Orthodox Church commemorates the Venerable Anthony the Roman, Wonderworker of Novgorod.

The venerable Anthony the Roman was born in Rome in the year 1067. His wealthy and God-fearing parents raised him in piety. The youth was seventeen years old when his father and mother died. Orphaned, Anthony devoted himself to the study of the writings of the Fathers in the Greek language; then he distributed part of his property to the poor, placed part of it in a barrel and cast it into the sea, and was himself tonsured a monk in the skete of a certain wilderness, where he labored for twenty years.

The persecution of the Orthodox by the Latins forced the brotherhood to scatter, and the venerable Anthony went from place to place. At last, upon a deserted seashore, he found a great rock, and upon it he struggled for more than a year. On the fifth of September, 1105, a sudden and terrible storm and surge carried the rock out to sea; and on the feast of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos, holy Anthony, miraculously preserved, found himself three versts from Novgorod, on the bank of the river Volkhov, near the village of Volkhovsko.

In that place, with the blessing of the holy hierarch Nikita the Recluse (†1109), the venerable Anthony founded the monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos. Once the net of fishermen drew up from the sea the barrel bearing the holy father’s inheritance; the blessed Anthony named what he had placed in it many years before, took the treasure, and purchased lands for the monastery. In 1131 the hierarch Nyphont appointed the venerable Anthony abbot of the monastery, and the much-laboring ascetic reposed on August 3, 1147.