Ven. Chariton the Confessor

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day Antiochian commemoration

  Chariton the Confessor

  Chariton the Confessor (†c. 350) was a citizen of Iconium who suffered torture for Christ under the emperor Aurelian, survived, and became the founding father of desert monasticism in Palestine. Delivered by a miracle from robbers who had imprisoned him in a cave near Jerusalem, he turned that cave into a church and around it grew the lavra of Pharan, the first of the three great lavras he founded — Pharan, Douka above Jericho, and Souka, the "Old Lavra." His rule of cell-dwelling hermits gathered for common worship set the pattern of Judean-desert monasticism a century before Euthymius and almost two before Sabas. He reposed in great old age and is commemorated on September 28.

• Holy Prophet Baruch (6th c. BC)

  Baruch son of Neriah (7th–6th century BC) was the scribe, disciple and faithful companion of the Prophet Jeremiah, who wrote at his dictation the scroll of prophecies that King Jehoiakim burned, shared the prophet's imprisonment and disgrace, and followed him into exile in Egypt after the fall of Jerusalem. The Orthodox Church counts him among the prophets in his own right for the book that bears his name in the Septuagint, whose oracle of the Divine Wisdom — "Afterward He appeared upon earth and conversed with men" (Baruch 3:37) — she reads as a direct prophecy of the Incarnation. His memory is kept on September 28, in the season of his master Jeremiah.

• Holy Martyr Vatslav (Wenceslas), King of the Czechs (929)

  Wenceslaus (Václav, in the Russian books Viacheslav; c. 907–935) was the prince of the Czechs, grandson and pupil of the martyr Ludmila of Bohemia. Raised by her in the faith and educated in Slavonic, Latin and Greek letters, he ruled Bohemia with a mildness his nobles read as weakness — building churches, ransoming enslaved children, and founding the church of Saint Vitus in Prague — until his younger brother Boleslav, drawn into a conspiracy of the discontented, invited him to a church feast and cut him down at the church door of Stará Boleslav on the morning of September 28, 935. The first of the Slavic princes to accept death in Christ-like meekness, he is venerated among the passion-bearers as the heavenly patron of the Czech lands, and his cultus in Kievan Rus' prepared the way for Boris and Gleb.

• Agapitus of the Kiev Caves

  Agapitus of the Kiev Caves (†1095) is the first physician of the Russian land whose name is remembered, and the first Russian saint to bear the title of the unmercenary healers — ἀνάργυροι, those who take no silver. A disciple of St Anthony of the Caves in the first generation of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, he healed the sick of the monastery and the city by prayer and by herbs he boiled himself, refusing all payment and all thanks, and healed among others the future Great Prince Vladimir Monomakh, whom he would not so much as let look at him. His story is told at length in the Kiev Caves Paterikon, chiefly for the sake of its counterpoint: a learned Armenian physician of Kiev, who diagnosed by inspection and predicted the day of death, and who was confounded first by Agapitus's cures and at last by the saint's foreknowledge of his own repose — after which the Armenian became an Orthodox monk. Agapitus's relics rest in the Near Caves, and he is commemorated on June 1.

• Alexander, Alphius, Zosimas, Mark and their Companions

  The martyrs Alexander, Alphius, Zosimas, Mark the Shepherd, Nicon, Neon, Heliodorus and some thirty companions suffered in the persecution of Diocletian (284–305) in the borderlands of Pisidia and Phrygia in Asia Minor. Their story radiates from one man: Mark, a shepherd of Pisidian Antioch, whose confession converted the soldiers who guarded him and the smiths ordered to forge his instruments of torture, and whose severed head, carried into a temple of Artemis, brought its idols down — winning a further company of young men and women for Christ and for martyrdom. They are commemorated together on September 28.

• Alypius the Iconographer

  Alypius (†17 August 1114) is the first icon-painter of the Russian Church whose name is known, and the founder of its whole tradition of painting understood as an ascetic craft rather than a trade. A boy of Kiev given by his parents to the Monastery of the Caves, he was apprenticed to the Greek masters who came from Constantinople to decorate the Dormition church in 1083, was tonsured by the igumen Nikon, and was afterwards ordained priest. He painted without payment for the rest of his life, dividing what he was given into three parts — materials, the poor, and his own necessity — and never allowed the work to displace the services. The Kiev Caves Paterikon preserves a cycle of wonders around him: icons of his hand that survived a fire unmarked, a leper cured with the paint from his brushes, and, on his deathbed, an angel who finished the icon he had been unable to paint and then received his soul.

• Anatolius of the Kiev Near Caves

  Anatolius (twelfth century) was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra whose relics rest in the Near (Antoniev) Caves and of whom the Paterikon records nothing whatever. He is one of the considerable number of Caves fathers known only by name, by the place of burial, and by the century assigned to him in the seventeenth-century catalogues of the Lavra. He is commemorated on July 3 and with the fathers of the Near Caves on September 28. He is not to be confused with his namesake of the Far Caves, whose memory falls on the same July day.

• Antony of the Kiev Caves

  Antony of the Kiev Caves (983–1073) is the father of monasticism in the land of Rus'. Born at Liubech near Chernigov and baptised Antipas, he went as a young man to Mount Athos, was tonsured there, and was sent back by his abbot with the word that he should carry the Holy Mountain's way of life to his own people. Settling in a cave dug in the wooded hill above the Dnieper at Berestovo, he lived on bread and water and drew disciples he had not sought; from that hole in the earth grew the Monastery of the Caves, the mother-house of Russian and Ukrainian monasticism, whose second founder and organiser was his disciple Theodosius. Antony himself never governed it: he appointed abbots and withdrew again into seclusion, and to the end preferred the cave to the church he had caused to be built. He reposed in 1073, and by a providence the tradition has never tried to explain away, his relics have never been uncovered.

• Ephraim of Pereyaslavl

  Ephraim of the Kiev Caves (†c. 1098) was a courtier of the Great Prince Izyaslav of Kiev who left the prince's service to become a monk under Saints Anthony and Theodosius at the Caves monastery. Sent to Constantinople, he brought back a copy of the Studite Rule, which Theodosius adopted as the constitution of the Caves and, through it, of Russian monasticism. Later consecrated bishop (and metropolitan) of Pereyaslavl, he adorned his city with churches and stone walls "in the Greek manner" and, in a work of rare Christian philanthropy, built free hospitals and public bath-houses for the poor and for travellers. He reposed about 1098 and was buried in the Far (Anthony) Caves, where his relics rest. He is commemorated on January 28 and among the Fathers of the Far Caves.

• Erasmus of the Kiev Caves

  Erasmus of the Kiev Caves (†c. 1160) was a monk of the Near Caves of the Kiev Caves Lavra whose whole substance went into the adorning of the monastery church with holy icons. Having spent all he had on the beauty of God's house, he was assailed by the thought — the tradition names it a demonic temptation — that he had done better to give his wealth to the poor; falling thereby into despondency and a careless life, he was brought back by a mortal illness in which the Mother of God appeared to him and promised to adorn and exalt in her Son's Kingdom the one who had adorned her church. Rising from unconsciousness, he confessed his sins before the brethren, received the great schema, and reposed on the third day. His relics rest in the Near (Antoniev) Caves, and his story is preserved in the Kiev Caves Paterikon.

• John the Long-suffering of the Kiev Caves

  John the Long-suffering (†18 July 1160) was a recluse of the Near Caves of the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev whose whole ascetic life was one prolonged war against the passion of the flesh. Denied relief by fasting, thirst and iron chains, he shut himself into a cave beside the relics of Antony of the Kiev Caves, stayed there thirty years, and in one Great Lent had himself buried standing in the earth up to the shoulders for the whole of the fast, his legs burning as though in fire. On the night of Pascha a fiery serpent that had tormented him for days took his head into its jaws; he cried out, and at a flash of lightning it vanished, and a voice told him that the trial had been sent to purify him as gold is purified, and that heavy work is given to strong servants. He is the saint to whom the Orthodox traditionally turn in temptations of impurity, and his relics lie in the cave where he fought.

• Juliana of Olshansk

  Juliana was the daughter of Prince Yuri Dubrovitsky-Olshansky, a Lithuanian-Rus' magnate of the early sixteenth century and a benefactor of the Kiev Caves Lavra. She died a virgin at the age of sixteen, and was buried near the Great Church of the Dormition. Long afterwards, monks digging a grave beside the church struck an unrecorded coffin and found her body incorrupt, lying as if asleep in a white dress sewn with gold and adorned with her ornaments, with an inscribed plate naming her. Healings followed at her shrine; a thief who stripped a jewel from the relics fell dead at the gate; and Metropolitan Peter Mogila, after a vision in which the saint reproached him for the little honour paid her, enshrined her with a solemn inscription. What survived the Lavra fire of 1718 was laid in the Near Caves, where it remains. Her feast is kept as the uncovering of her relics, on July 6.

• Kuksha of the Kiev Caves

  Kuksha was a monk-priest of the Kiev Caves monastery in the early twelfth century who went out to the Vyatichi — the last openly pagan Slavic tribe of the Rus' lands, settled along the upper Oka — baptised them, and was killed there with his disciple Nikon after many tortures, some time after 1114. His death was known at Kiev the same day because Pimen the Faster, standing in the monastery church, cried out that their brother Kuksha had been slain that morning for the Gospel, and then died himself. Kuksha is the chief missionary martyr of the Caves monastery, and his relics lie in the Near Caves.

• Moses the Hungarian

  Moses was a Hungarian in the service of the Kievan prince Boris — one of three brothers, with George, who was killed at his master's side in 1015, and Ephraim, who became the founder of the monastery at Novy Torg. Moses escaped the murder on the Alta, was carried off to Poland as a prisoner of war when Bolesław the Brave took Kiev in 1018, and there was bought by a rich Polish widow who wanted him for a husband. He refused her for five years and more; she had him flogged a hundred strokes a day and at last mutilated. When her protector died and Poland rose in revolt she was killed, and Moses came at last to Kiev, to the caves of St Anthony, where he lived about ten years in silence and reposed about 1043. His relics lie in the Near Caves. The Kievan Church keeps him as the confessor of chastity, and those troubled by the passions of the flesh have been sent to his relics for a thousand years.

• Neophytos the Recluse

  Neophytos the Recluse (1134–1219) — ho Enkleistos, "the Enclosed" — is among the greatest saints of Cyprus, called for his eloquence the "Chrysostom of the island." Born of a poor family at Lefkara and unlettered in youth, he entered the monastery of Saint John Chrysostom at Koutsovendis, learned his letters almost by grace alone, and after seeking the eremitic life in the Holy Land was led back to Cyprus, where in 1159 he found a cave in the hills above Paphos and made of it his Enkleistra ("Enclosure"), a hermitage dedicated to the Holy Cross. There, walled into his cell, he lived some sixty years as a recluse and yet became the teacher of a monastic community and of all Cyprus, leaving a vast body of homilies, biblical commentaries, hymns, and letters — among them a famous eyewitness lament over the calamities that fell on Cyprus with the Third Crusade and the conquest of the island by Richard the Lionheart (1191). He reposed on April 12, 1219; his relics were uncovered in 1750, and his Enkleistra remains a living monastery. His chief feast was transferred to January 24.

• Nicon of the Kiev Caves

  Nicon, surnamed "the Dry" (Sukhoi), was a monk of the Kiev Caves monastery who was carried off captive during a Polovtsian (Cuman) raid, held three years in cruel bondage, and — after refusing ransom and enduring the hamstringing of his legs — was miraculously returned to the Caves; the withering of his body from his sufferings gave him his by-name. He reposed at the monastery around 1101 and rests among the fathers of the Near (Antoniev) Caves.

• Onuphrius the Silent of the Kiev Caves

  Onuphrius, called the Silent (molchalivy), was a monk of the Near (Antonian) Caves of the Kiev Caves Lavra in the twelfth century, whose whole recorded ascesis is the one contained in his epithet: he kept silence. Nothing else of his history survives. His relics rest in the Near Caves among the incorrupt relics venerated there, his name is read in the Canon to the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves, and he is commemorated on July 21 and with the whole company of that house on September 28.

• Pimen the Much-Ailing of the Kiev Caves

  Pimen, surnamed the Much-Ailing (Mnogoboleznenny), is the monk of the Kiev Caves whose whole ascetic life was an illness. Born sick and never healthy, he begged his parents to bring him to the monastery; and when they, having brought him, began instead to pray for his cure, he prayed for the opposite — that his sickness might continue and that he might be tonsured. He was tonsured, the account says, by angels in the likeness of monks, who told him he would receive his health only on the day of his death. So it fell out: after twenty years of grievous suffering borne with joy, and often left days at a time without food or water by attendants worn out with him, he rose up whole, took leave of the brethren, communicated, prophesied over the graves of two monks, lay down on his bed and died. His relics rest in the Near (Antoniev) Caves, and he is commemorated on August 7.

• Simon of Vladimir

  Simon (†1226) was a monk of the Kiev Caves who became abbot of the Nativity monastery at Vladimir and, in 1214, the first bishop of the newly separated see of Vladimir-on-the- Klyazma and Suzdal, appointed by the Grand Prince George Vsevolodovich and consecrated by the Metropolitan Matthew of Kiev. He governed the young diocese for twelve years, consecrating its churches, and is remembered above all as one of the authors of the Kiev Caves Paterikon: his narratives of the wonders of the Caves fathers, and the long epistle to the monk Polycarp which stands at the head of the collection, gave the Russian Church one of its classic monastic books and its most famous protest against ambition for office. He took the great schema before his death, and though buried at Vladimir his relics were carried, according to his own wish, to the Near (Antoniev) Caves at Kiev, where they rest. His memory is kept on May 10.

• Spyridon and Nicodemus the Prosphora-Bakers of the Kiev Caves

  Spyridon and Nicodemus (12th century) were two monks of the Kiev Caves Monastery who together kept the obedience of baking the prosphora — the bread offered at the Divine Liturgy — for thirty years. Spyridon entered the monastery already advanced in age during the abbacy of Igumen Pimen (1132–1141); unlettered, he had nonetheless learned the whole Psalter by heart and recited it daily as he worked. He was glorified by miracles in his lifetime, most famously when his burning mantle, catching fire from the oven, was quenched without being consumed. Nicodemus shared his labour and his strict ascetic life. Their incorrupt relics rest in the Near Caves of Saint Anthony, where the fingers of Spyridon's right hand are still joined for the sign of the Cross. They are commemorated on October 31.

• Theoctistus of Chernigov

  Theoctistus was a monk of the Kiev Caves, its igumen from 1103, and from 1113 the bishop of Chernigov — a career that spans the two decades in which the Caves monastery became the mother of the Russian episcopate. As abbot he built the monastery's stone refectory and secured the entry of Theodosius into the Synodikon, so that his name should be sung in every church of the land; the Caves Paterikon credits his prayers with the deliverance of the deluded recluse Nikita, who afterwards became the holy bishop of Novgorod. As bishop he stood close to Vladimir Monomakh, worked among the still-pagan Vyatichi, and built churches to the passion-bearers Boris and Gleb. He died on 6 August 1123, and because that day is the Transfiguration, the Church keeps his memory on the fifth.

• Theodore and Basil of the Kiev Caves

  Theodore and Basil were monks of the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev who were tortured to death in 1098 by Prince Mstislav Svyatopolkovich over a hoard of buried treasure that Theodore had found, renounced, and reburied — and whose hiding-place God had taken from his memory. Their story, told at length in the Paterikon of the Caves, is one of the most sharply drawn narratives of early Russian monasticism: an account of the demon of avarice working first through a lie and then through a prince, of a friendship that held under torture, and of a dying man's prophecy that the arrow shot into him would return to the archer. Within a year the prince was killed by that arrow at the walls of Vladimir-Volynsky. The two rest in the Near (Antony's) Caves and are commemorated on August 11.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Conwall (Conval), disciple of St. Kentigern (630)
• St. Tetta, abbess of Wimborne (8th C)
• St. Lioba, abbess and missionary (782)
• St. Machan, monk

Troparia & kontakia

Readings