Abramius the Lover-of-Labour of the Caves
Our Venerable Father Abramius the Lover-of-Labour, of the Near Caves of Kiev
Venerable
Commemorated 21 August — Commemoration of the toiler of the Near Caves
Abramius was a monk of the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev whose whole memory is contained in his epithet. The seventeenth-century accounts of the Caves fathers say that he toiled in the cave and worked to provide whatever the brotherhood of the Caves needed, and that he was therefore called trudolyubivy — "the lover of labour," the hardworking one. Neither his origin, nor his years, nor any word of his is transmitted; not even his century is fixed, the estimates ranging from the twelfth to the early fourteenth, with the Mongol devastation of Kiev in 1240 as the period most often proposed. His relics rest incorrupt in the Near Caves of St Antony, where they are venerated to this day, and the Church keeps him on August 21.
The record, and its limits
The Kiev Caves monastery preserved a great deal about its early fathers in the Paterikon and lost a great deal of everything else; and Abramius belongs among the many whose names survived in the caves themselves — on the coffin, in the burial-lists, in the accounts of the pilgrimage — rather than in a written vita. The whole of what the sources transmit is that he laboured in the cave and that he prepared what was needful for the brotherhood, and that from this he had his name.
That is not, however, empty. To be called trudolyubivy in a Kievan cave-monastery is to be placed in a definite ascetic tradition and given a definite office: the monk whose obedience is bodily work for the community, whose sanctity is worked out in the bakehouse or the kitchen or the carrying of water and timber, and who has no other visible ministry. It is the holiness of the prosphora-bakers, gardeners and cooks of the Caves Paterikon: labour taken as prayer, and offered for others.
The date
The dating is genuinely unsettled, and the corpus records the disagreement rather than choosing. Archbishop Sergius (Spassky), in his Complete Menologion of the East, places him in the twelfth–thirteenth centuries; the Orthodox Encyclopedia prefers the second half of the thirteenth into the early fourteenth; and a common Russian tradition assigns him to the years of the Mongol-Tatar invasion, that is to the destruction of Kiev in 1240 and after. The thirteenth century is the point on which these overlap and is what this entry gives; nothing more precise is available.
Relics and veneration
His relics lie in the Near Caves of St Antony at the Kiev Caves Lavra, among the ranks of incorrupt fathers whose coffins line the passages, and they have been shown to pilgrims for as long as the caves have been described. He is commemorated on his own day, August 21; with the whole company of the Near Caves at their Synaxis on September 28; and with all the fathers of the Caves, near and far, on the Second Sunday of Great Lent, whose date moves with Pascha.
Feast and commemoration
August 21 (church date; New Calendar civil August 21, Old Calendar civil September 3), within the afterfeast of the Dormition; kept in Russian and Ukrainian usage and by the Orthodox Church in America, and not in the Greek or Antiochian books. He falls on the same day as the far better-known Abramius of Smolensk, with whom the Russian day-lists always print him, and the two are regularly confused. He is commemorated further at the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves (September 28) and at the synaxis of all the Fathers of the Kiev Caves on the Second Sunday of Great Lent — a movable commemoration, and therefore carried in this corpus by the movable sweep rather than by any fixed date.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O Father, that which was made after the image of God was preserved unimpaired; for taking up the Cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou hast taught us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, which is immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Abramius, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
He is painted in the manner of the lesser fathers of the Caves: a monk in dark mantle and koukoulion, of no fixed age, the hands crossed on the breast or raised in prayer, named by the inscription and by nothing else. His place is in the great composite icons of the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves, where the whole company is ranked in tiers about the Dormition church of the Lavra and each father is identified by a small Slavonic label; there he stands among the fathers of the second and third rows. Where a distinguishing attribute is given him at all it is the tool of manual labour — a spade or a vessel — but this is rare and late. No pre-1900 icon of him alone has been located for this repository, and it is unlikely that one exists: he is an icon-crowd saint.
Disputed questions
- Which Abramius. Four saints of the name stand in the Russian calendar of August 21 and they are constantly transposed: this monk of the Kiev Caves; Abramius of Smolensk, the archimandrite and preacher, who is by far the best known and whose day this principally is; Abramius of Paleostrov, the successor of Cornelius on Lake Onega; and, in some lists, the martyr Abramius kept elsewhere in the year. Add to these Abramius of Galich (July 20) and Abramius of Arbela, and the name is among the most crowded in the calendar.
- A second Abraham in the Caves. The Far Caves also preserve the relics of an Abraham or Abramius commemorated with the fathers of that side of the monastery. Whether the two are distinct persons or a single memory divided between the two cave systems is not determinable from the surviving lists, and both are transmitted.