The life of St Anthony the Roman of Novgorod
When persecution by the Latin church in the West forced the brothers of that community to scatter, Anthony made his way to a rock on the shoreline and lived there alone for a year in fasting and prayer. Tradition holds that in September 1105 a violent storm tore the very stone he stood on loose from the shore and carried it out to sea, and that this same rock, bearing the saint, drifted for a great distance before coming to rest near Novgorod on the feast of the Theotokos's Nativity, an event the Novgorod chronicles themselves record as having happened. There, with the blessing of the hermit Niketas, Anthony founded a monastery in honor of that same feast, later raising a stone church for it that still stands. In 1131 Bishop Niphon of Novgorod made him abbot of the community he had founded. He died in 1147, and, in a detail the chronicles preserve alongside the rest, the barrel he had cast into the sea decades earlier was said to have washed ashore near Novgorod not long after his own arrival there.
