Anthony, baptized Antipas, was born at Lyubech in the Chernihiv region. As a young man he traveled to Mount Athos, took monastic vows there, and was sent back to Kievan Rus' with the blessing of his Athonite abbot to plant Athonite-style monasticism in the newly Christian Rus'. He returned in the 1050s and settled in a cave dug by the future metropolitan Hilarion in the wooded hills above the Dnieper south of Kiev.
Other men joined him, the community grew, and around 1062 he installed his disciple Theodosius as superior — Anthony himself preferring the strict solitude of the cave. The community he founded, the Kiev Pechersk Lavra (Monastery of the Caves), became the cradle of Russian and Ukrainian monasticism and the model for every Eastern Slavic monastery that followed.
His feast is celebrated together with that of his disciple Theodosius on the synaxis of all the Kiev Caves Fathers. His relics, like those of all the Lavra fathers, remain in the original caves where they were buried, venerated as incorrupt for nine hundred years.