Anatolius the Recluse of the Kiev Far Caves
Our Venerable Father Anatolius the Recluse, of the Far Caves of Kiev
Venerable · d. 13th century
Commemorated 3 July — Principal commemoration, 28 August — Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves
Anatolius the Recluse (thirteenth century) was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra who shut himself into a cell in the Far (Theodosian) Caves and whose relics rest there. Beyond the fact of his enclosure — which is what the epithet затворник records — nothing is transmitted about him: no origin, no teacher, no year, and no miracle. He is commemorated on July 3 and with the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28, and is distinguished in the calendars from his older namesake of the Near Caves, whose memory falls on the same day.
The enclosure
The one substantive thing the tradition preserves about Anatolius is his reclusion. The zatvor was the severest of the disciplines practised at the Caves: a monk was walled or sealed into a cell in the galleries, receiving food through an aperture, and lived out his life there in prayer and silence, sometimes for decades. The Caves are full of such men, and the Paterikon's famous narratives — of Isaac, of John the Long-Suffering, of Nicetas — are all accounts of what enclosure did to those who attempted it, for good and for ill. Anatolius's name stands in that line, and it stands there with no story attached.
The Lavra's catalogues place him in the Far Caves, the second and later system of galleries dug about the cell of St Theodosius, and date him to the thirteenth century — that is, to the generation of the Mongol destruction of Kiev in 1240 and after, when the monastery was ruined above ground and the caves went on being lived in below it. Nothing in the sources connects him directly to those events.
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 Far Caves on August 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, like that for his namesake, reads: "No information available at this time."
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
Having shut thyself in the darkness of the caves that thou mightest see the unwaning Light, and having become dead to the world while yet alive, O venerable father Anatolius: entreat Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
He has no individual type and no attribute. In the composite icons of the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves he takes his place among the ranked figures on either side of the church, a monk in the great schema with hands crossed or holding a scroll, distinguished only by the inscription of his name; recluses are sometimes marked in such compositions by being shown half-emerged from the mouth of a cell, but no such distinguishing treatment is attested for him in particular. No pre-1900 image identifiable as his has been located, and none is stored here.
Disputed questions
- Two Anatolii, one day. The Russian calendar commemorates on July 3 both this father and Anatolius of the Near Caves, assigning the latter to the twelfth century and this one to the thirteenth, and distinguishing them by the caves in which their relics rest. Some lists apply the epithet затворник to both, and modern popular sources — including a Wikimedia Commons image described as "Anatolius the Recluse of the Kyiv Caves, Near Caves, 12th c." — conflate them outright. The distinction followed here is the Lavra's own and that of the Russian Church's calendar. Whether two separate men lie behind the two entries, or one man whose commemoration split as the two cave systems came to be catalogued separately, cannot be determined from the surviving material; it is a real possibility and is flagged rather than resolved.
- Not to be confused with Anatolius, Patriarch of Constantinople (†458), commemorated on the same July 3, nor with the elders Anatolius of Optina of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.