Qualla: Antoniev Monastery

Antoniev Monastery: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ludvig14, CC BY-SA 3.0. The legend is so strange that it has survived nine centuries of telling and retelling. An Italian monk named Anthony, fleeing persecution in Rome around the year 1106, climbed onto a rock by the sea to pray. Storms swept him away. After two days adrift, he washed up on the bank of the Volkhov River near Novgorod, more than two thousand miles from home. The rock is still there, in the vestibule of the church he built, sitting beneath a fresco of Bishop Nikita. Whether you believe the story or not, the monastery Anthony founded in 1117 is one of the few buildings in Russia that has survived from the twelfth century, and the man who supposedly drifted there from Rome on a stone is buried beneath a slab to the right of its altar.

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Image: Ludvig14 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Antoniev Monastery: An Improbable Founder

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vash Alex kun, Public domain. Anthony was born in Rome in 1067, in a Christian world that had only recently split between Latin West and Greek East. His family kept the Orthodox faith in a city that was turning sharply Catholic, and according to the tradition, the pressure on Eastern believers grew unbearable...

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Image: Vash Alex kun | Public domain

Antoniev Monastery: Three Domes on the Volkhov

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Максим Вячеславович Гуреев, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, completed in 1119, is one of only a handful of three-domed churches in all of Russia. Stand on the right bank of the Volkhov north of the old Kremlin and you can pick it out by that triple silhouette, white walls rising above the r...

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Image: Максим Вячеславович Гуреев | CC BY-SA 4.0

Antoniev Monastery: A Monk Who Counted the Years

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ludvig14, CC BY-SA 3.0. One of the monastery's most remarkable residents was Kirik the Novgorodian, a twelfth-century monk who wrote what scholars consider the first mathematical treatise in the Eastern Slavic world. His Teaching on Numbers worked out calendar calculations and the durations of small fra...

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Image: Ludvig14 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Antoniev Monastery: Ivan's Reach

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ludvig14, CC BY-SA 3.0. The monastery grew wealthy, becoming the fourth-largest landowner among Novgorod's many religious houses. Then Moscow came. After Ivan III conquered Novgorod in the 1470s, much of Antoniev's land was confiscated. Worse arrived a century later: in 1570, during what historians call...

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Image: Ludvig14 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Antoniev Monastery: Museum, Not Monastery

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ludvig14, CC BY-SA 3.0. After the Bolshevik Revolution the monastery was closed, and unlike many Orthodox sites it has not been returned to the Russian Orthodox Church. It now belongs to the Novgorod United Museum-Preserve, part of the Historic Monuments of Novgorod and Surroundings UNESCO site. Visitor...

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Image: Ludvig14 | CC BY-SA 3.0