Anatolius of the Kiev Near Caves
Our Venerable Father Anatolius, of the Near Caves of Kiev
Venerable · d. 12th century
Commemorated 3 July — Principal commemoration, 28 September — Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the 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.
What is known
The record is empty, and honesty requires that it be left so. The Kiev Caves Paterikon — the great collection of the lives of the fathers of the Lavra — contains no narrative of Anatolius; the Lavra's own catalogues of the saints buried in the Near Caves give his name, the epithet venerable, and a dating to the twelfth century, and nothing more. His relics lie in the Near Caves, the older of the two subterranean burial systems of the Lavra, dug around the cell of St Anthony, and it is there that they have been venerated since the general glorification of the Caves fathers.
That silence is itself characteristic. The Caves monastery buried its dead in the galleries it had dug, and the incorruption of the bodies — a phenomenon of the dry, cool, constant conditions of the Kievan loess as much as anything else — made the caves a place of pilgrimage long before anyone thought to write the lives of the individual monks. When the catalogues came to be compiled, in the seventeenth century, names survived where stories had not. Anatolius is one of some scores of such names.
Feast and commemoration
July 3 (church date; New Calendar civil July 3, Old Calendar civil July 16), and with all the fathers whose relics lie in the Near Caves on September 28; he is included also in the general commemoration of all the venerable fathers of the Kiev Caves kept on the second Sunday of Great Lent, which is movable and is not entered in the entry's record. Russian and Ukrainian usage; carried by the OCA calendar, whose entry for him reads in full: "No information available at this time."
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
O dweller of the caves and citizen of heaven, who didst hide thy labours from men as thou didst hide thy body in the earth, venerable father Anatolius: entreat Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
He has no individual iconographic type. Where he is painted he appears in the generic likeness of a Caves father — a monk in the mantiya and koukoulion of the great schema, with a scroll or with hands crossed on the breast, identified solely by his inscription — and in practice he is met almost exclusively in the great composite icons of the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves, where the fathers stand in tiers on either side of the Dormition church of the Lavra, each a small figure with his name written beside him. The one candidate image found on Wikimedia Commons under his name carries the description "Medieval ages" with no museum, no attribution and no date that can be verified, and conflates the Near and Far Caves Anatolii in its own text; it was therefore not stored, and a the list of icons still being sought entry stands in its place.
Disputed questions
- Near Caves or Far? Two monks named Anatolius are commemorated on this same day, one in the Near and one in the Far Caves, and the sources do not always keep them apart: they are given different centuries (twelfth and thirteenth) and different burial places, but both are styled затворник, "the recluse," in some lists, and material about one is regularly attached to the other. The two are kept distinct here, following the Lavra's own catalogues and the Russian calendar, which lists them together and separately: прпп. Анатолия Печерского, в Ближних пещерах (XII) и Анатолия Печерского, затворника, в Дальних пещерах (XIII).
- Was he a recluse? The epithet затворник is attached in some lists to this Anatolius and in others only to the Far Caves father. It cannot be decided, and no claim is made here.
- Not to be confused with Anatolius, Patriarch of Constantinople (†458), commemorated on the same day, nor with Anatolius the Recluse of the Kiev Far Caves, nor with the nineteenth-century elders Anatolius of Optina.