Cyril of Turov

Origins and early life

Cyril was born in the 1130s in the town of Turov, on the Pripyat in the Turov–Pinsk country of the western Kievan realm (in what is now southern Belarus), the child of wealthy parents. The notices of his life stress that his family's rank gave him an education few in Rus could have had: he learned the sacred books from childhood and studied under both Russian and Greek teachers, so that he read and thought in the Byzantine manner. The evidence of his own writings bears this out at every turn — they move in the idiom of Greek homiletics, with the antitheses, apostrophes and dramatised speeches of the fourth-century Fathers, handled with a freedom that no translator's Slavonic can account for.

Coming to manhood, he renounced his inheritance and was tonsured in the monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb at Turov, the house dedicated to the passion-bearing princes. His own writings on monasticism, and the sayings preserved of him, show what kind of monk he was: he demanded absolute obedience to the abbot, and taught that a monk who is not obedient to his igumen does not fulfil his vow and therefore cannot be saved. Three of his works treat the monastic life, among them the Tale of the Monastic Order, from the Old Law and the New — an allegorical exposition of the tonsure and the habit against the pattern of the Tabernacle and the Temple.

The pillar

From the coenobium Cyril withdrew to a still stricter discipline: he enclosed himself upon a pillar (столпничество), the Byzantine ascetic form of Symeon and Daniel the Stylites, and there, in the words of the notice, "set forth much of the divine Scriptures." He is the first stylite named in the Russian record, and the pillar of Turov became a place to which people came for counsel: it was there that his reputation for holiness and learning was made, and from there that the Church took him.

Bishop of Turov

At the desire of the prince of Turov and of the people, Cyril was drawn from his pillar and consecrated Bishop of Turov — by the usual reckoning about 1169, in the metropolitanate of Kiev. His episcopate falls in the bitterest years of the breaking-up of Kievan Rus, when Andrew Bogolyubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal was making his own north-east into a rival centre of the Russian land.

In 1169 Cyril took part in the council which condemned Bishop Theodore of Vladimir — "Fedorets" to the chroniclers — who had sought to detach his diocese from the metropolitanate of Kiev and to have himself made an independent hierarch, and who had governed his church with violence. Cyril's part in the condemnation was not merely juridical: he wrote against Theodore, and the tradition reads his Parable of the Human Soul and Body — the tale of the blind man and the lame man who together rob their master's vineyard — as a coded indictment of the ambitious bishop and his prince, the blind man standing for the shepherd without spiritual sight and the lame for the ruler without a straight walk. He also addressed a series of epistles to Prince Andrew Bogolyubsky on the disorders of the churches, exercising the office of the hierarch as a teacher of princes.

About 1182 he left his see, whether by resignation or by withdrawal into retirement, and gave the last years wholly to writing and prayer. He reposed on April 28, about the year 1183.

Hymnographic and literary legacy

Cyril's surviving corpus is the largest and most accomplished body of original writing from twelfth-century Rus. It falls into four kinds:

• Sermons on the feasts. He composed slova for the cycle of the Lord's feasts through the church year, of which some dozen survive: on the Sunday of Thomas ("New Sunday"), on the Myrrh-bearing Women, on the Paralytic, on the Man Born Blind, on the Ascension, on the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, on the Deposition of Christ from the Cross. Not all that he wrote is preserved. Their manner is a dramatised, richly figured rhetoric — spring imagery for the renewal of the world at Pascha, invented laments and dialogues for the Mother of God and Joseph of Arimathea, question and answer, apostrophe to the congregation — Byzantine in technique and wholly assured in Slavonic. The Sermon on the New Sunday, with its famous comparison of the risen creation to the spring, is the single most anthologised page of pre-Mongol Russian literature.
• Parables and allegories. Besides the Parable of the Human Soul and Body, there is the parable of the white-robed monastic order and other extended allegories, in which a narrative is set out and then interpreted member by member in the manner of the Greek exegetes.
• Monastic writings. Three works on the monastic life, including the Tale of the Monastic Order from the Old Law and the New, and a letter to an abbot named Basil.
• Prayers and canons. A cycle of prayers for the days of the week, appointed to be said after the hours — devotional texts of great tenderness and compunction that passed into Russian prayer-books and were still being copied and printed centuries later — together with a canon and a penitential canon attributed to him.

A collected edition of his works was published in 1880 under Bishop Eugene, containing some forty pieces; the prayers and the festal sermons had circulated in manuscript for seven hundred years before that.

Veneration and later cultus

His contemporaries called him "a Russian Chrysostom", and the epithet stuck: the troparion of his feast styles him zlatoslovesnyi uchitel', the golden-worded teacher. His memory was kept from soon after his repose; the Prologue notices him, his prayers were copied in the household books of the pious, and his name stands in the general commemorations of the Russian saints. Turov itself declined and the see lapsed, and no relics of his are preserved.

In modern times he has become the chief patron of theological learning in Belarus, whose Church honours him as its foremost native writer and hierarch — a bishop of the Pripyat country claimed alike by the Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian traditions of the one Kievan inheritance.