John the Recluse of Svyatogorsk
Our Venerable Father John the Recluse of the Svyatogorsk Dormition Monastery
Venerable · b. 20 September 1795, Kursk — d. 11 August 1867, the Svyatogorsk Dormition Monastery
Commemorated 11 August — Repose at the Svyatogorsk monastery
John the Recluse (born Ivan Kryukov at Kursk, 20 September 1795; †11 August 1867) was the great ascetic of the Svyatogorsk monastery on the chalk cliffs above the Donets, and the best-known Russian recluse of the nineteenth century after Theophan of Vysha. A merchant's son who spent half his life trying to reach the monastic state and being sent back to the world, he came at last to the Holy Mountains when the ruined house was restored in 1844, was tonsured, and about 1850 entered the reclusion in a cell hollowed out of the chalk of the cliff, where he remained some seventeen years — in cold, damp and darkness that destroyed his health and finally his sight — receiving no one but his confessor and living on a diet that his biographers found scarcely credible. He reposed on 11 August 1867, was glorified in 1995, and his relics are venerated in the Sviatohirsk Lavra.
Ivan Kryukov
He was born on 20 September 1795 at Kursk, into a family of the merchant class, and was baptised Ivan. The biographical tradition is unanimous that he wanted to be a monk from childhood, and equally unanimous about what stood in the way: the obligations of a tradesman's son. He was kept in the business, and in due course made responsible for a family whose maintenance depended on him. He is said to have gone more than once to a monastery and to have been sent back by his elders on the grounds that his duty at home came first — a detail with a hard edge to it, since the pattern occupied the whole of his youth and middle age.
He remained in the world into his forties. The southern Russian monastic revival of these decades — the Optina fathers, the Glinsk hermitage, the disciples of Paisius Velichkovsky's line — was the atmosphere in which his intention was formed, and he was part of the very large lay public that the revival drew.
The Holy Mountains
The Svyatogorsk — "Holy Mountains" — monastery stands on the right bank of the Seversky Donets in the Izium district, where the river has cut a face of white chalk into which the monks of the sixteenth century and earlier had dug churches, galleries and cells. The house was suppressed under Catherine II in 1787 and its buildings passed into private hands; it was restored in 1844 by the Potemkin family, who owned the estate, and repopulated with monks from the Glinsk hermitage and elsewhere.
Ivan Kryukov came to the restored monastery in this first cohort and was at last tonsured, receiving the name Ioannikios; he was afterwards clothed in the Great Schema as John. For some years he served the community in the ordinary way — the accounts name him among the officers of the house, with charge of its practical affairs during the difficult years of the restoration — and the community had seventeen or eighteen years of his life altogether.
The chalk cell
About the middle of the 1850s he was blessed to enter reclusion in a cell in the chalk of the cliff, and there he stayed for some seventeen years, until a week before his death.
The Russian accounts of his manner of life are circumstantial and severe. The cell was cut in damp rock; it was cold in every season and did not dry; there was almost no light, and he kept a lamp before the icons for what light there was. He wore chains. His food was of the least and his sleep was taken sitting. He kept the full monastic rule of prayer alone, and attended the services through an opening giving on the cave church. Under these conditions his body broke down: his limbs swelled and stiffened, and toward the end he lost his sight altogether.
What the accounts also record is that the reclusion was not a disappearance. Word of him spread through the whole south of Russia, and Svyatogorsk became a place of pilgrimage on his account; people came in numbers to write to him, to ask his prayers, and to receive through his confessor the short and practical answers that are the substance of what survives of his teaching. The monastery's own great expansion in the second half of the century — it became one of the most visited houses in the empire — dates from these years and is not unconnected with him.
Repose and glorification
About a week before the end he was brought out of the cell and carried to the monastery's infirmary farmstead, where he died on 11 August 1867 (old style; 24 August by the civil reckoning of the day), in his seventy-second year.
His memory was kept locally without interruption, through the destruction of the monastery in the Soviet period and its return to the Church in 1992. He was glorified in 1995 as a locally venerated saint of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church; his relics were uncovered and are enshrined in the Sviatohirsk Lavra, which received the rank of lavra in 2004. In 2003 he was numbered also among the Synaxis of the Saints of Kursk, the diocese of his birth, and he is commemorated with the Synaxis of the Saints of Sviatohirsk.
Feast and commemoration
August 11 (church date; New Calendar civil August 11, Old Calendar civil August 24), the day of his repose, within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and the Dormition Fast (August 1–14).
The commemoration is Ukrainian and Russian and is entered in the calendars of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Orthodox Church in America; it is naturally kept with the greatest solemnity at the Sviatohirsk Lavra, where the relics are and where the chalk cell is shown to pilgrims. He is commemorated again with the Synaxis of the Saints of Sviatohirsk and with the Synaxis of the Saints of Kursk. The Greek and Antiochian books do not carry him.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
Having sought the monastic life from thy childhood and been long detained in the world, thou didst at last find in the chalk of the Holy Mountains a cell narrower than a grave, O father John; and shut therein in darkness and cold, thou wast made a lamp to the whole land, so that the sightless became a guide to those who see. Intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
John is painted in the settled nineteenth-century Russian manner for a schema-monk elder: an aged man, thin-faced, with a long grey or white beard, in the black mandyas with the Great Schema — the analavos embroidered with the cross, the lance and the reed, the skull and the letters — visible on the breast, and the pointed koukoulion on the head. The right hand blesses or holds a prayer-rope, the left an unrolled scroll. Because there were photographs of him and a death-portrait, his icons keep a genuine likeness rather than a type, which is usual for the Russian saints of this century: the narrow face, the deep-set eyes, the sparse beard.
Two features are proper to him. The chalk cell is shown behind or beside him as a white cave-mouth in a white cliff, often with the Svyatogorsk skete-church of St Nicholas perched on the rock above — the monastery's unmistakable silhouette; and his blindness is sometimes indicated by the closed or unfocused eyes of the late portraits. In the composite icons of the Synaxis of the Saints of Sviatohirsk he stands in the front rank.
No image is stored here, and none is possible under the repository's rules: the saint died in 1867 and was glorified in 1995, so that every icon of him is a work of the last thirty years and under its painter's copyright. He is entered among the wanted icons against the possibility of a free-licensed photograph or lithograph of pre-1900 date.
Disputed questions
- Seventeen years, or eighteen? The accounts differ slightly: some say he spent seventeen years in the reclusion, others eighteen years at Svyatogorsk in all. The two numbers are frequently confused in retellings; they are not the same figure, and both are approximate.
- The date of death is given as 11 August 1867 in the church calendar (old style) and as 24 August 1867 in accounts using the civil reckoning; these are the same day. The feast is kept on August 11 as a church date.
- The name in religion. He is entered in the calendars as John, his schema-name; the tonsure name Ioannikios appears in the monastery's records and in some accounts, which occasionally produces two apparently different monks in English retellings.
- The extent of the record. This entry is written from the Russian and Ukrainian monastic accounts and the Sviatohirsk Lavra's own tradition; no critical biography was available to the repository, and the details of the early life in particular — the repeated refusals of the monastery, the family obligations — belong to a hagiographic tradition that has not been checked against documents. The dates of birth, death and glorification are secure; the interior narrative should be read as the monastery's memory of him.
- Not to be confused with the many other Johns of the calendar who bear the epithet the Recluse, and in particular with John the Much-Suffering of the Kiev Caves (July 18), also a recluse in a cave.