Venerable Anthony of Iezeru-Vâlcea, also known as Anthony the Hesychast, was a Romanian monk and anchorite of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries who pursued a life of extreme stillness in the mountain sketes of Vâlcea county. He is best remembered for the small chapel he carved by hand into the rock of Mount Iezeru, where he spent his final decades in solitary ascetic struggle. He is commemorated on November 23, and was glorified by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1992.
According to the tradition followed by the OCA synaxarion, Anthony was born in the sub-Carpathian mountains of Vâlcea county and was devoted to Christ from early childhood. He visited the monasteries and sketes of the region and conversed with the hesychasts who sought quietude there, eventually entering monastic life at Iezeru Skete. A separate Romanian tradition records him instead as a merchant of Vlach origin, born in Ioannina, who was married and had a son who became a priest, and who entered monastic life only later, taking the habit at Sărăcinești Monastery before joining Iezeru. The sources agree on the shape of his later monastic life even where they differ on his origins.
In 1690, after he had acquired experience in the ascetical life, the abbot blessed Anthony to live as a solitary a few kilometers above Iezeru Skete, on the mountain of the same name. He labored for three years to dig a chapel out of the cliffside with his own hands, using only a hammer and chisel and working by day while keeping vigil by night. When it was finished, the chapel was consecrated by Bishop Hilarion of Râmnicu Vâlcea, and a hieromonk from the skete would come to celebrate the Divine Liturgy there on feast days.
Anthony's regimen was severe even by the standards of the hesychast tradition he followed. He is said to have eaten only breadcrumbs soaked in water and salt together with a few vegetables, to have slept only two or three hours, and to have devoted himself to constant vigils, the daily services, hundreds of prostrations, and the continual repetition of the Jesus Prayer. He fell asleep in the Lord in 1714, after roughly a quarter-century of this struggle, and his disciples buried him beside the chapel he had carved. The rock-cut church remains a place of pilgrimage.
