Constantine and Cosmas of Kosinsk
Our Venerable Fathers Constantine and Cosmas, Abbots of Kosinsk near Staraya Russa
Venerable · d. Constantine c. 1240; Cosmas somewhat later, at the Kosinsk monastery
Commemorated 29 July — Repose of Constantine; the two founders commemorated together
Constantine and Cosmas were monks of the Khutyn monastery near Novgorod, of the generation formed by Barlaam of Khutyn and by Anthony of Dymsk, who about the year 1220 withdrew into the wilderness south of Lake Ilmen and settled on a tongue of land — a kosa, whence the name Kosinsk — three versts from Staraya Russa, between the rivers Polist and Snezhna. There they built a church of Saint Nicholas and gathered a brotherhood. Constantine governed the community as abbot until his repose about 1240; Cosmas, his companion from the beginning, succeeded him and was buried beside him. Their relics rest under the porch of the Saint Nicholas church raised over their tomb in 1820, and they are commemorated together on July 29 among the venerable fathers of the Novgorod land.
Out of Khutyn into the wilderness
Both men belonged to the great Novgorodian monastic flowering of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, whose centre was the Saviour's monastery at Khutyn on the Volkhov, founded by Barlaam of Khutyn (†1192). The Russian tradition names them disciples of Barlaam and companions of Anthony of Dymsk, Barlaam's successor, who himself left Khutyn to found a hermitage on Lake Dymsk — so that the departure of Constantine and Cosmas belongs to a recognisable pattern: the second generation of a great house going out to plant smaller ones in the forest.
About 1220 the two left Khutyn and went south, into the marshy country at the southern end of Lake Ilmen, and settled on a wilderness peninsula about three versts from the town of Staraya Russa, at the place where the rivers Polist and Snezhna run together. The land there is a narrow spit between water and water, and the Russian word for such a spit — kosa — gave the monastery its name: the Kosinsk, or Kosino, monastery.
The monastery of Saint Nicholas
They built a wooden church in honour of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker — the natural patron for a house set among rivers and for a town of salt-boilers and boatmen — and cells about it, and a brotherhood gathered. The written record of the house is thin; what survives is the shape of the thing rather than its detail. Constantine was its first abbot and governed it for some twenty years, until his repose about 1240, on the eve of the Mongol devastation which was to sweep the Russian lands and which the Novgorod country escaped only narrowly.
Cosmas — companion, co-founder, and in the tradition the more retiring of the two — took up the burden after him and carried it to his own repose, whose year is not recorded, and was buried beside Constantine in the monastery church. From that time the two are named together in the Russian books, as they had lived and laboured together, and no attempt is made to separate their memories.
The tomb and the later monastery
The Kosinsk monastery lasted through the centuries as a small house dependent on Staraya Russa, was closed and reopened more than once, and in the eighteenth century became a convent. Over the tomb of the founders a stone church of Saint Nicholas was built in 1820, and their relics rest beneath its vestibule, unopened. Their veneration has always been local — the Novgorod and Staraya Russa country — and their names are carried in the general Russian menologia under July 29 and in the synaxis of the saints of Novgorod.
Feast and commemoration
July 29 (church date; New Calendar civil July 29, Old Calendar civil August 11), a Russian commemoration, kept also by the OCA; the Greek and Antiochian calendars do not list them. They are named again in the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod (the third Sunday after Pentecost, a movable commemoration) and locally at Staraya Russa. The July 29 date is taken as the repose of Constantine, the two being commemorated together on it.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of venerable fathers)
Ye did flee the tumult of the world and seek out the wilderness of the waters, and there ye did build a house to the Wonderworker of Myra and gather a brotherhood to Christ; and having laboured together, together ye were laid to rest. O venerable Fathers Constantine and Cosmas, entreat Christ God that our souls be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
The two are painted together, as founder-abbots: bearded monks in mantiya and koukoulion or in the simple monastic skhima, one older and one younger, standing on either side of the church of Saint Nicholas which they hold between them in the founders' manner — the model of the monastery in their joined hands — with the rivers and the low wooded spit of Kosinsk beneath. In some Novgorodian compositions they appear in the assembly of the saints of Novgorod, in the ranks below Sophia.
No pre-1900 icon of Constantine and Cosmas of Kosinsk has been located for this repository; searches of Wikimedia Commons under the Russian forms of their names returned no results. They are listed among the wanted icons.
Disputed questions
- Dates. Only the approximate foundation (c. 1220) and Constantine's repose (c. 1240) are transmitted; Cosmas's year is unknown, and the fourteenth-century dates given in some later compilations appear to arise from a confusion with a subsequent abbot of the same name.
- Constantine, not the prince. He is not to be confused with the right-believing princes named Constantine of the Russian lands, in particular Constantine of Murom (May 21): the Kosinsk Constantine is a monk with no princely connection.
- Kosinsk, not Kosino. The Modenskaya (Kosinskaya) Icon of the Mother of God, listed in some Russian calendars on June 20, takes its second name from a different Kosino, near Moscow, and has no relation to this monastery.
- No Wikidata item for either saint was found at the time of writing.