Early life and conversion to monasticism
According to his life, Anthony was born around 1479 with the baptismal name Andrew in the village of Kekhta near the North Dvina river, into a prosperous farming family. The synaxarion relates that as a child he received a fine education, read widely, and learned the art of iconography.
After the death of his parents he went to Novgorod, where the tradition records that he spent five years in the service of a boyar. He married during this period, but his wife died after about a year. He then resolved to embrace the monastic life, gave away his goods to the poor, and travelled to the Pachomiev Wilderness monastery at the River Kena. There Saint Pachomius received and tonsured him, giving him the monastic name Anthony, and he was subsequently ordained a hieromonk.
Foundation of the Siya monastery
In 1520 Anthony, accompanied by a small band of companions, settled on Mikhailov Island among the lakes of the Siya river, a tributary of the Northern Dvina, in what is now the Arkhangelsk region. In this remote forested frontier he built a chapel, and the community that gathered there grew into the monastery later known as the Antoniev-Siysky (Anthony-Siya) Monastery.
The life relates that when his companions grew discouraged by the hardship of the place, an unknown benefactor supplied them with the means of subsistence. Wikipedia records that the foundation was made with the permission of Grand Prince Vasily III to build on state land, and that the monastery came under the ecclesiastical authority of the archbishop of Novgorod.
Later years and repose
By tradition Anthony withdrew for a period of solitude at Lake Palun, living as a hermit for three years before the brethren prevailed upon him to return and resume the leadership of the community. He guided the monastery as its abbot until his death in 1556, when, the life relates, he was seventy-nine years old.
He is commemorated in the Orthodox calendar on December 7. His monastery in the north of Russia preserved his memory, and a vita of the saint was composed in the later sixteenth century.
