Elias of Murom

The monk of the Near Caves

What the Church transmits with certainty is brief. Elias was a monk of the Near (Anthony's) Caves of the Kiev Caves Lavra, a native of the city of Murom on the Oka, in the north-east of the Rus' lands. He bore the byname Chobotok — "the little boot," rendered in the calendars "the Shoemaker" or "the Cobbler," a nickname explained in the legends by a feat performed with a boot in his hand. He is placed in the twelfth century, his repose set by tradition around 1188, and he was numbered among the venerable fathers of the Caves whose relics lie incorrupt in the Near Caves.

The three-fingered sign of the Cross

One physical detail of his relics became, in a later age, theologically famous. Saint Elias reposed with the first three fingers of his right hand joined together and the two outer fingers folded to the palm — that is, in exactly the form of the sign of the Cross used in the Russian Church today, and not in the two-fingered form of the Old Ritualists. During the long struggle over the Nikonian reforms in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the incorrupt hand of a saint of the twelfth century, frozen in the three-finger sign, was cited as a weighty proof in favour of the received practice.

The warrior Ilya Muromets

In the popular imagination Elias of Murom is one and the same as Ilya Muromets, the foremost hero of the Russian byliny — the oral epic ballads of Kievan Rus'. In these songs Ilya is a peasant's son of Murom who lay paralysed for thirty-three years until healed by wandering pilgrims (kaliki), then took up arms as the mightiest of the warriors at the court of Prince Vladimir "Fair Sun," defending Holy Rus' against her enemies. The Church has kept a certain reserve about the identification: the Orthodox Church in America notes plainly that "there is no strong basis" for simply equating the epic hero with the monk. Yet the two memories converged in the veneration of the Caves saint, whose inscribed icons name him "Ilya Muromets," and the tradition that a great warrior ended his days as a penitent monk of the Caves is old and tenacious. A forensic examination of the relics in 1988 was widely reported to have found a powerfully built man of middle height who had suffered in youth from a disease of the spine — consistent with the legend of long paralysis — and who bore old combat wounds, dying at last of a wound to the chest; such findings are read by many as support for the traditional identification, while the historians' caution remains. The hero also passed into art beyond the Church, most famously in Reinhold Glière's Third Symphony, "Ilya Muromets" (1911).