Gregory the Iconographer of the Caves
Our Venerable Father Gregory the Iconographer, of the Near Caves of Kiev
Venerable
Commemorated 8 August — Commemoration of the iconographer of the Near Caves
Gregory the Iconographer was a monk of the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev and the companion in that craft of Alypius, the first named icon-painter of the Russian land. The Accounts of the Holy Iconographers preserved at the monastery say that he painted many wonderworking icons that were dispersed throughout Rus'; the ninth ode of the canon for the Synaxis of the Fathers of the Near Caves calls him a "Byzantine," which most probably means that he was one of the Greek masters who came from Constantinople to Kiev to decorate the Great Church of the monastery, the cathedral of the Dormition. His relics rest in the Near Caves, and he is commemorated on August 8.
The Greek painters of the Great Church
Almost everything that can honestly be said of Gregory comes from two lines and an epithet, and it is best to be plain about that. The monastery's own tradition, gathered in the Skazanie or Accounts of the Holy Iconographers attached to the Kiev Caves Paterikon, names him among those who worked with the icon-painter Alypius of the Caves (August 17), and credits him with having painted many icons which were carried away over the Russian land and became wonderworking.
The one further detail is the word "Byzantine" applied to him in the ninth ode of the canon at the Synaxis of the Fathers who repose in the Near Caves (September 28). Taken with the known history of the house, it points to a definite context. The Paterikon relates that under the abbot Nikon, in the last quarter of the eleventh century, Greek master-builders and afterwards Greek mosaicists and painters came from Constantinople to raise and adorn the Great Church of the Dormition — the story being told with the marvel that the Mother of God herself had summoned them and paid them at Blachernae. Some of those Greeks did not go home: they were tonsured and lived out their lives in the monastery. Alypius, a native of Kiev, was given to them as an apprentice and learned his art from them. Gregory, called a Byzantine, belongs to that same company — either one of the Greek masters who stayed, or a painter formed among them.
Repose and relics
He reposed in the twelfth century, and was buried in the Near (Antonian) Caves, where his relics remain and are venerated. He is numbered in the great Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves, kept on September 28, and in the Synaxis of All the Saints of the Caves on the second Sunday of Great Lent — the latter a movable commemoration and therefore not among this entry's fixed feasts.
Feast and commemoration
August 8 (church date; New Calendar civil August 8, Old Calendar civil August 21), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration. His is a Russian and Ukrainian commemoration, carried into the OCA calendar; the Greek Menaion does not know him. He is also commemorated with the whole company of the Near Caves on September 28, and in the movable Synaxis of All the Saints of the Caves on the second Sunday of Great Lent.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
In thee, O Father, was the divine image kept unbroken; for thou didst take up the Cross and follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Gregory, thy spirit rejoiceth together with the Angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
An iconographer is painted as what he was: a monk in the dark habit and koukoulion, grey-bearded, holding not a scroll but the tools and the product of his craft — a small panel or a brush and paint-board, and sometimes a completed icon of the Mother of God turned toward the viewer. This is the type given to Alypius of the Caves in the Kiev tradition, and Gregory, his companion, is shown in the same way in the composite icons of the Fathers of the Near Caves, where the whole company is ranged in tiers above a section of the cave-corridors.
No storable image has been found for him. The only relevant Commons candidates are an engraving from the illustrated Lives of the Saints published 1903–1911, captioned merely Григорій Печерскій and therefore of uncertain reference among the several Gregorys of the Caves, and a 1894 composite of the Near Caves synaxis in which he cannot be individually identified. A wanted icon is recorded.
Disputed questions
- Which Gregory of the Caves? The Kiev Caves have several saints of this name, and the calendars distinguish them by epithet rather than by any developed life: Gregory the Wonderworker of the Caves (January 8, drowned in the Dnieper about 1093), Gregory the Faster (January 8), and this Gregory the Iconographer (August 8). They are separate persons; anonymous nineteenth-century Russian engravings labelled simply Григорій Печерскій cannot safely be assigned to one rather than another, and none has been used here for that reason.
- Century. The twelfth century is the placing given by the Russian calendars. If he was in fact one of the Greeks who came for the Great Church, his working life would begin in the late eleventh; the sources do not allow the question to be settled, and no year of repose is transmitted.
- Not to be confused with Gregory of Sinai, commemorated on the same day, August 8 — a Greek hesychast of the fourteenth century with no connection to Kiev; nor with Gregory the Byzantine of Athos (April 6), although the shared epithet "Byzantine" makes the pair an easy confusion.