LIUDMILA KNYAZEVA

THE ASCENT

This story is based on fact, nothing in it is fictionalized

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IN LIEU OF PREFACE

The life of hierodeacon Antony has been shaped by a cruel fate, indeed. It all began one day when he, a callow youth, was forced to leave his father’s home and overnight became a wanderer and eventually a martyr. Having first deprived him of eyesight, of hearth and home, and finally of family happiness, the cruel fate, however, was unable to break his spirit and his resolve to live an honest life following the dictates of Christian conscience.

But before beginning my story about this remarkable Orthodox monk I would like to ask you first who of you could define the meaning of your life? Do any of you know for certain and exactly why you came into this world?

There are those among us who choose to turn our life into a gamble with death, while others play a lifelong game of chance for financial gain. There are those for whom life is a lifelong toil to provide for their family members, to feed their near and dear ones. For the hero of my story his life became a steady ascent to the pinnacle of true faith and the true meaning of earthly life.

So here comes the story of the life and death of hierodeacon Antony, a blind Orthodox monk.

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THE BEGINNINGHierodeacon Antony, (in the secular world his

name was Alexander Semyonov), was born on August 19, 1913 in the village of Elaur on the Volga into a devout peasant family. The baby boy came into the world at midnight, to the accompaniment of church bells ringing the call to prayer at the all-night vigil on the eve of the Transfiguration.

His father, Dmitry Fyodorovich Semyonov, came of wealthy peasant stock and owned two mills, a watermill and a windmill, 14 horses, a dozen or so cows and a large family house of his own. He was a fairly well educated man by the standards of his day having finished a private school in the city of Syzran.

Alexy’s mother, Natalya Alekseyevna, came from the village of Bukoyel, 60 km from Elaur. Her father, Aleksei Yefremov, was a merchant and shipowner who had traveled extensively on his trading business up and down the Volga and in the Caspian Sea. He also visited Persia and India from where he once brought a bride for himself. He had been looking a long time for the right woman. He found her when he was thirty. Her name was Ishna.

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Upon her conversion to Orthodox Christianity she was given the name of Irina.

Dmitry Semyonov and Natalya Yefremova got married in 1901. Of the seven children born to them only three survived and attained majority: two sons, Mikhail, Alexander and one daughter Katerina. The children got a religious education. Agathia, the nanny of little Sasha, hailed from Saratov and was a very devout and pious woman. She taught the boy to read and write and at age 7 he could read canonical hours in the local church.

However, he was destined to enjoy his happy and unclouded childhood only for four short years. The Bolshevik Revolution broke out in 1917 and rudely changed all that.

Early in 1918 his father, to the surprise of all suddenly sold all he owned, put his family on board a steamer and sailed up the Volga to the city of Cheboksary where the family disembarked. For another week they rode on horseback deep into the wilds of Chuvashia eventually halting at the village of Kakerli-Shigali, Chuvash for “red stone”, about a dozen miles from the district center of Shemursha. In the village surrounded by thick forest there was a beautiful wooden triple-throned church dedicated to the Archangel Michael. Not far from it the Semyonovs built a large wooden six-room, two-storeyed house.

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The house was not so much for the family’s needs, as it turned out. The Semyonovs frequently put up passing pilgrims on their way to Sarov to venerate and pay homage to the relics of St. Serafim. Before long Sasha’s father became the local church warden. His mother for her part looked after the pilgrims feeding them, preparing steam baths for them and, whenever necessary, treated them with healing medicinal herbs and folk medicine tinctures.

What made Sasha’s father drop everything and move deep into the forests of Chuvashia is the subject of the next chapter of my story.

For now let us recall the words of the Lord’s Prayer:

Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come,Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses

As we forgive those who trespass against usAnd lead us not into temptation But deliver us from Evil, Amen.

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THE PARENTSOur parents. Are we always able to properly

understand the motives behind their actions? When we are young we often tend to be too quick to take offense at their actions but as we grow older we come to appreciate, if belatedly, their wisdom and righteousness. Indeed, what is at bottom, the meaning of life for each one of us? Is it not the embodiment of our parent plans, their will and desire to see us become what we in most cases eventually become thanks to their efforts? Do we not regret sometimes that our growing up and maturity often comes too late in life? Before we can bring joy to our parents with our successes and accomplishment while they are still living. Sometimes we become not only the embodiment of their victories, merits and services but can also become an expiation of their sins. Each one of us continues to bear our cross and has to pay the price for the mistakes made by our parents. And so it is from generation to later generation. We either add to the good things that our parents did or else we come to atone for and expiate their sins and leave something for our children to inherit. But what exactly is it?

That is my question to you. What do you think?What “baton” will our children carry on in the

“relay race” of their life, our spiritual gains or will

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they have to atone for our sins in their later life? What do you think?...

And what of Antony’s parents? What was it that they had wanted to leave for their sons?Repentance for their sins or an ascent as a reward for the righteousness of their ways?... Judge for yourself.

In 1901, long before Antony was born, his father and grandfather on the mother’s side, once got on a steamer and sailed to Saratov on the Volga. In the city’s cathedral they had the good fortune to meet St. John of Kronstadt, who gave them his blessing to abandon their estate and all possessions, and flee from the tornado of revolutionary change. Telling his own children later about this fateful meeting Dmitri Fyodorovich quoted the words of St. John of Kronstadt: “Spare nothing but your life. Drop everything, flee from your village. Take your family with you and run!”

Dmitry Semyonovich took the prophetic advance warning of St. John of Kronstadt seriously. And indeed by pulling up his stakes and fleeing he gave his family an extra ten years of relatively quiet life. He gained valuable time to give his children education, to temper their spirit and character and fortify their faith.

In 1928 came and the Bolsheviks banned the local parish.

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On the night of Good Friday a group of local militant atheists led by members of the new local government burst into the Semyonovs’ house demanding that Dmitry Fyodorovich, the parish warden, hand over the keys to the Archangel Michael Church. They planned to convert the church into a clubhouse, you see.

He flatly refused to surrender the keys as he would not let the blasphemes desecrate the holy temple. Well, the Bolsheviks beat a retreat and found another place for the clubhouse but not before they burnt the Archangel Michael Church down. Dmitry Fyodorovich, for his refusal to surrender the keys was shot summarily. Before he was buried they stripped him naked and threw him into a hole in the ground without bothering to put him into a coffin even. They drove an aspen stake, the earth mound info wrote: “Enemy of the great Soviet people”. Good Lord, it’s unbelievable! And yet that’s exactly what happened and how it happened. Every word of it is true (let us pray for the innocent martyr Dmitry and for the repose of his soul).

MEMORY ETERNALHis soul shall reside with the righteous.And his memory will live on in generations.

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THE EXODUSIn the same year of 1928 Natalya Alekseyevna

died of a heart attack. She was survived only by a short while by Agafya, Sasha’s nanny. That is how children often became orphans in Russia in those days. If the life of little Sasha’s parents was as tragic as that what kind of life was their son destined to live as he grew up?

When their church was sacked and burnt down about 150 local monks, Sasha among them, took to the surrounding forest where they built a wooden church in honour of the Holy Virgin. They began to perform regular divine services. Helping one another in every way the brethren built cells for themselves. In March 1934 Alexander, who was a novice by now, took monastic vows and was given the name of Alexy and the rank of hierodeacon. In 1937, the year of the Great Terror the local communists felt they could no longer tolerate the fact that in a country of victorious socialism, that was a bunch of monks made so bold as to refuse to join the local collective farm, refused to work like everyone else did and refused to believe in the victory of communism choosing to believe in the Triune God alone.

In October 1937 their patience finally ran out and they decided to put an end to religion once and for all seeing it as a pathetic vestige of the past and a harmful breeding ground for the “opium of the

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people”. They began by mercilessly sacking the monks’ skete (wooden church). In keeping with the despicable Bolshevik tradition the defenseless monks were arrested in the middle of the night, put onto a sledge train and were taken to Kazan. In the city center they built a huge bonfire. To get the clergymen to give up their bad habit to praying to God they decided to try a simple method: flogging. Playing safe they had the monks hands tied, just in case. Apparently they feared that the monks might resist and fight back. They stripped the shirts off the monks’ backs and threw them into the bonfire. They burnt everything, including the little crosses which the monks wore next to their skin. They made the monks lie down with their bare backs up to form a sort of human bridge and began whipping them until their skin split apart and their backs turned into a bloody mess. To their utter surprise, however, this “innocent” act of intimidation failed to produce the desired effect: none of the monks exhibited any desire to join the communist party or the local collective farm, for that matter. Later the monks were transported under guard further into the wilds of Siberia to the city of Tyumen. At each and every town on the way the cruel ritual of public flogging was repeated. Throughout the winder of that year the monks were almost worked to death felling trees. And yet their spirit was not broken and they continued to perform divine services and

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acts of worship openly defying the cruel punishments inflicted on them by their overseers, and defying death itself. At one point Bishop Mikhail, was killed right before Alexey’s eyes. He died a true martyr’s death. The Bishop was celebrating mass on Christmas night right in the barracks, from memory as all his liturgical and prayer books were taken away from him. This act of audacity and daring infuriated the prison guards and they decided to punish the bishop as a lesson to the rest of the monks. At the crack of dawn they led the bishop the barracks stood him in a ditch and began pouring cold water over him until he turned into a pillar of solid ice…

BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATHSoon afterwards Nazi Germany attacked the

Soviet Union and the Great Patriotic War began. The torturers and tormentors of yesterday now became martyrs themselves, victims of the unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Nazis. In Nazi concentration camps Orthodox believers and communists were thrown together, shoulder to shoulder. Only then did they come to realize the uniqueness of their own lives and the essential bond of unity with the life of the rest of their fellow countrymen. But before that reconciliation came to pass Alexander was destined to go through not a few ordeals.

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At the end of the winter of 1937 Alexander found that the humiliations and indignities that the prison authorities heaped upon hieromonk Tikhon, his confessor, was too much for him to bear. He could not take it any longer. At one point the infuriated prison chief grabbed Tikhon and threw him into a cauldron of boiling water. The unfortunate old monk must have died instantly, scalded out of life by the fiercely boiling water. That was the limit. Without a moment’s hesitation Alexander picked up a big log and bashed the prison chief over the head with it with all his might. The prison chief collapsed weakly with his skull crashed in.

“Thou shall not kill…” is the first commandment of Jesus Christ. “Do not kill!” the monks kept pleading but no one would listen.

“Let them kill me, too,” Alexander said to himself as he decided to stand up for the innocent elderly monk. He had no intention of killing anyone, he was just going to stop the killer. And for the first time a miracle happened and it seemed that death itself sided with the monk.

And what do you think? What do you think a true believer should have done in that situation?

Until his dying day did Alexy continue to repent his crime of killing the villain. And yet all those who saw him do it did not think that he sinned. They saw Father Alexy’s entire life as a powerful

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extenuating circumstance. He was not shot, instead, together with all the other inmates: monks, clergymen and “kulak” wealthy peasants, was transported under guard further north to Naryan-Mar.

Which is where he spent another six months of his captivity in a prison camp.

THE GOD-GIVEN GIFTIn late March 1939 the NKVD secret police

officers tried to execute Father Alexy on a crude home-made electric chair. As Alexy later related: “That was on my name day. My cell-mates, Father Gevrasy and Father Gesaky, gave me their blessing saying: “We bless you to go through yet another ordeal, dear father hierodeacon. Please forgive us.” And I replied: “I must beg forgiveness from you. After all it was I who killed. Perhaps I stood up not for the sake of Christ, perhaps I should not have done that, but I felt sorry for father Tikhon. Perhaps I was wrong.” And they said: “No, you were right, Father Deacon. Father Tikhon was a holy man for us. And God will forgive your sin for his sake.” That is how they encouraged and supported me.

They led me into a cell and made me sit in a rigid armchair. They connected up wires to my eyes and turned on the current. There was a clap, a blinding flash and my eyes were gone. I felt as if something

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heavy hit me on the head. And together with the armchair I collapsed and rolled down into the basement. Where I lay on the floor for a week and nobody even bothered to come to check if I was dead or alive. I had a splitting headache but I did not die. When they led me out of the basement the armchair remained there.”

Amazingly, God himself must have saved Alexander from certain death.

On April 7, 1939 at the Annunciation which that year coincided with Good Friday they decided to execute all the inmates by firing squad. Those of the inmates who were too exhausted and could not work, who were sick, blind and crippled were tied up and transported by sledge train to a deserted place for execution. On the way a violent snowstorm began and fearing for their lives the guards decided to abandon the condemned inmates in the middle of a snowbound field and hurried back to camp. The would-be executioners were sure that the exhausted inmates deprived of any help were doomed to die of exposure. They were wrong. The monks survived, successfully disengaged themselves from the trammels and went their separate ways. Hieromonk Antony later recalled: “I rose to my feet with difficulty and began to walk. I kept on walking for a long time and then I slipped, lost my balance and fell into a high snow drift. I remember thinking to myself: “This is it, this is my

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home and this is my end.” I was totally buried under the snow and that was the last and only thing I remembered.

THE BAPTISMHalf-frozen to death, he was found, as if by a

miracle, by local Yakut hunters who brought him to safety and nursed him back to life .

Alexy was not ungrateful. No, he had no money and yet he found a way to repay the Yakut family for his rescue and survival. The small son of the master of the house fell ill and at one point the parents gave up on him thinking him as good as dead and began to prepare for his burial. However, Father Alexy asked them not to hurry and spent the whole day and night fervently praying for the boy: “Not for my sake, the sinful and unworthy monk that I am but for the sake of this little boy and his family, dear God please help!” Thus he pleaded with God and to the amazement of all the boy recovered. Struck by this miracle the Yakuts proceeded to destroy their idols whom they worshipped and began to call Alexy their “god”. Embarrassed, Alexy replied: “I am no god. I am the last and most sinful servant of God, that’s what I am.”

Whether the Yakuts understood what he was saying we do no way of knowing. After all, they could hardly speak Russian. One thing is certain,

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however, and that is that they decided to undergo conversion to Orthodoxy in a body. The master of the house and his immediate family were the first to become christened. Later their relatives and neighbours followed suit. The newly baptized Yakuts then invited Father Alexy to stay on in their settlement but he chose to press on.

What was it that lured Alexander on? He was blind and yet he would not stay put. How did he manage to find his way? True, good people made two wooden staffs for him. The dark and thicker one served as a support for him on the road. He would lean on it as a youth leans on his father’s shoulder. The lighter staff helped him walk round obstacles, like a mother protecting her child, keeping him out of harm’s way, as it were. Alexander was following paths that eventually lead to our Father’s Home.

At this point I would like to ask you a question. Do any of you know your own genealogy and family tree? If you do, how far back? How many generations back? … Have you ever heard of Noah’s Ark? Do you know that after Adam Noah is our closest relative? Yes, Noah is our common primogenitor. It was to him, to our biblical forefather that Father Antony was going.

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THE VENERATIONIt was at the end of August 1941 that the Greek

Archimandrite Anphim chanced to meet Alexander on the road. The sagacious elderly monk made friends with Father Alexy and suggested going together to Mount Ararat, to visit the site of Noah’s Ark on the Turkish side of the border. The state frontier did not become an insuperable obstacle in the path of the two Orthodox pilgrims: Father Anphim knew some of the secret hidden trails in the mountains used by the small community of local Christian hermits. They asked the local Greek Archimandrite for his blessing and set off on foot across the valley of the River Arak. For the next two weeks they were making a slow laborious ascent on Mount Ararat. As Alexander later recalled it was a very steep hard climb and they had to step carefully along the narrow trail. One unguarded false step and you could slip up and fall into the abyss.

On the third week of their pilgrimage to Noah’s Ark the two monks halted for three days in the cave of the Greek ascetic Elpidiphor who spoke Russian quite well. They had potluck with the kindly host who gave them his blessing for their onward journey. Blessed with the god-given gift of second sight Father Elpidiphor predicted that they would reach their destination without incident. Providing for every eventuality, before they left Elpidiphor

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gave them a pouch of tobacco for the Turkish border guards, he said.

Leaving the hospitable ascetic’s cave the two pilgrims reached Noah’s Ark on the seventh day of their trek. Noah’s Ark was heavily guarded by Turkish border guards. They would not let anyone anywhere near the Christian shrine until the pilgrims gave them some tobacco. After getting what they wanted the Turks fed the pilgrims and allowed them to approach Noah’s Ark. Alexy later recalled: “We made a low bow to the Ark before going inside. The ark had three floors with very low ceilings barely high enough for an average man to stand upright. There were many rooms and enclosures for cattle and wild beasts on the lower tier.” Inside his ark Noah found salvation for his family and for the families of all succeeding generations of men. It was to venerate his forefather that a grateful Russian Orthodox son of his ascended to the top of Mount Ararat. It was inside Noah’s Ark that he regained a sense of family and kinship with the rest of his fellow countrymen. He let go his sadness, his sense of orphanage and loneliness. It was here that he regained his power of second sight that enabled him to see things that ordinary human eyesight cannot see.

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SECOND SIGHTFather Alexy was a totally disfranchised person

quite without rights of any kind. Officially he was considered non-existent, recorded as shot, He did not have any passport. That being the case, he had no opportunity to start a family of his own. His bishop blessed him to wear secular dress and to take a job as a press operator at a printing shop run by an artel of the Russian Society of the Blind. It was not until he reached the age of fifty that they finally gave him a passport. In 1978 he was old enough to retire as an old-age pensioner. Despite the fact that Natalya Sharova, chair of the Russian Society of the Blind tried her best to help him get a one-room apartment to live he never got it. Apparently that was not to be. Father Alexy spent the last years of his life in the town of Zhukovsky outside Moscow where he lived in the small two-room apartment of a lay sister of the local Monastery of St. Paraskeva, on the edge of a beautiful forest park. It was there that Father Alexy began collecting a library of Orthodox literature and liturgical and prayer books for the blind. The lay sister dictated to him and Alexy typed the text using a special typewriter. His tiny apartment was filled with piles of religious books.

One day a young priest, Father Pavel from the village of Ilyinskoye learnt of Father Alexander’s God-given gift of second sight. In the old days

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there was an ancient wooden cathedral dedicated to St. Peter in Ilyinskoye. Later, during the Soviet period, the cathedral was completely destroyed. Father Pavel asked Alexy to help him find the exact site of the altar of the destroyed cathedral in order to rebuild it. For geodesic reasons the new cathedral could not be built exactly on the site of the old. Alexy pinpointed the right place and determined the location of the three thrones of the old cathedral by striking the ground with his cane three times saying “Throne here! Throne here! And throne here!” Since then the new wooden church of the SS Peter and Paul has been working at Ilyinskoye.

On Lazarus Saturday, April 23, 1994 Father Antony received the vows of schema at the St. Catherine Monastery and was given the name of Antony. The monastery was closed down at the height of the Bolshevik persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church and later was converted into a maximum-security political prison. In the late 1980s when the winds of perestroika were sweeping across Russia the monastery was returned to the church and it began rising from the ashes. Having taken the vows of schema Father Antony proceeded to make a series of prophetic predictions about the future.

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(Father Antony and Lay Sister Paraskeva at the church yard after the divine service.)

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THE DEMISETwo years later, in 1994, Father Antony fell ill.

Sensing the approach of his death he chose the St. Catherine Monastery to be his final resting place. “I want to be laid to rest next to the martyrs,” he said.

The Bolsheviks deprived Antony of eyesight but God protected him by blessing him with the gift of second sight. The Bolsheviks took his parents away from him, but God led him to Noah’s Ark, he touched it with his own hands, the work of the biblical forefather of the human race. He was denied the opportunity to have a family of his own but he was richly compensated for this loss by acquiring a great many spiritual children who gave him the affectionate nickname of “otchenka”, Russian for “kindly father”.

Hierodeacon Antony passed away on December 19, 1994, on St. Nicholas Day, the saint he venerated very much. On December 22, following the blessing from Metropolitan Juvenaly Father Antony was buried at the St. Catherine Monastery in the town of Vidnoye-2, on the north side from the Peter and Paul Cathedral.

Father Antony will be sorely missed and always remembered by all those among the Orthodox community who knew him and loved him as a truly holy man. He was laid to rest at a holy place: the grounds of the St. Catherine Monastery hallowed

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by the suffering and blood of innocent victims. Father Antony had fully shared their sufferings in his earthly life and it was entirely fitting for him to wish to be laid to his eternal rest next to them in the life beyond.”

(Father Antony shortly before his death)

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From the AuthorI had the good fortune to know personally Father

Antony’s last lay sister, the now late nun Pavla (before taking the veil her name was Paraskeva) who told me a lot about Father Antony. She also passed on to me unique materials about him including lifetime video footage complete with a recording of Father Antony telling his own life story, along with some other documentary material.

During the last years of Pavla’s life I lived and worked together with her at the Monastery. I later wrote a drama one-act play based on this story. Called “The Ascent to Noah’s Ark”, it was performed at the municipal drama theatre in the city of Istra early this year.

My Symphony No.1 is a piece of programme music and I used selections from it for the musical accompaniment of the one-act play.

Dear readers, I would appreciate any comments you might care to make about this book. My e-mail address is: eremeevo@list.ru

Respectfully yours,LK

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