Menas of Polotsk
Our Father among the Saints Menas, Bishop of Polotsk
Bishop · Venerable · d. 1116
Commemorated 20 June — Repose at Polotsk
Menas (†1116) was a monk of the Kiev Caves monastery who on 13 December 1105 was consecrated Bishop of Polotsk, and is the first bishop of that ancient see whose name and consecration are securely recorded. He belongs to the first generation of native Russian hierarchs after the Baptism of Rus', when the Caves monastery was supplying bishops to the new dioceses of the north and west, and he governed Polotsk for eleven years in the years of its greatest independence from Kiev. Almost nothing of his episcopate is transmitted beyond the fact of it; his memory is preserved in the Paterikon of the Kiev Caves and in the service of the fathers of the Caves, and he is commemorated on June 20 and in the synaxis of the Saints of Belarus.
Monk of the Caves
Menas was formed at the monastery of the Caves at Kiev, the mother-house of Russian monasticism, in the generation after Theodosius. That house was at this period the principal seminary of the Russian episcopate: from its brotherhood came the bishops sent out to Novgorod, Rostov, Vladimir-in-Volhynia, Turov, Chernigov and Polotsk as the diocesan structure of the young Church was filled in. Menas is named among the monks whose memory the house kept, and he is commemorated in the service of the holy fathers of the Caves.
Bishop of Polotsk
On 13 December 1105 he was consecrated bishop of Polotsk — the date is one of the few precise ones the Russian chronicles give for a bishop of that century, and it is recorded because the consecration took place at Kiev under the Metropolitan.
Polotsk, on the Western Dvina, was the seat of the most self-willed of the Rurikid branches: the line of Vseslav the Sorcerer (†1101), which had fought Kiev for a century and would go on fighting it. A see there was a difficult charge, and the fact that Kiev chose a Caves monk for it, rather than a Greek, says something about the confidence the metropolitanate placed in the monastery. Menas held the see for eleven years and died in 1116.
Of what he did in those years the sources say nothing. He is described in the Russian books simply as one of the first Russian archpastors, continuing the work of spreading the faith after the Baptism of Rus'; the Life adds that he kept the monastic manner of life after his elevation, which is the standard commendation of a Caves bishop and may in his case be no more than that.
His episcopate is the setting, a generation later, of the greatest saint of that city, Euphrosyne of Polotsk (†1173), the princess of Vseslav's line who became a nun and a copyist of books; she was born about the time of his death, and the Christian Polotsk into which she was born is the one over which he had presided.
Feast and commemoration
June 20 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 3). A Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian commemoration, kept also by the OCA; the Greek books do not have him. He is commemorated in addition with the synaxis of the Saints of Belarus, which is movable — the third Sunday after Pentecost — and therefore belongs to the movable rules and not to this fixed day; and among the fathers of the Kiev Caves, whose synaxes fall on September 28 (Near Caves) and the second week of Great Lent.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
The truth of things revealed thee to thy flock as a rule of faith, an icon of meekness and a teacher of abstinence; therefore thou hast attained the heights by humility, and riches by poverty. O father and hierarch Menas, intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 2
From the caves of Kiev thou wast sent to the Dvina as a lamp to a dark room, O hierarch Menas, and having kept the monk's rule upon the throne, thou didst finish thy course in peace; wherefore we honour thee as a father of the land of Belarus.
Iconography
Menas is written as a Russian hierarch of the pre-Mongol period: an elderly bishop with a long beard, in phelonion and omophorion, blessing and holding the Gospel-book; in Russian usage he may wear the klobuk rather than a mitre, and the schema may be shown beneath the vestments to mark the monk under the bishop. He has no independent type: he is met almost exclusively in the group compositions — the fathers of the Kiev Caves, where he stands among the hierarchs of the Near Caves, and the synaxis of the Saints of Belarus, where he stands with Euphrosyne of Polotsk and Cyril of Turov.
No pre-1900 icon of him alone has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- What is actually known. Beyond the consecration of 13 December 1105 and the death in 1116, nothing about Menas is independently attested. Fuller accounts in devotional literature elaborate the bare notice; this entry does not follow them. He is an honest example of a saint known from a chronicle line and a monastic commemoration.
- Not to be confused with the Egyptian Menas the Great-martyr (November 11), by far the most famous bearer of the name, whose cult at Abu Mena near Alexandria was one of the great pilgrimages of the Christian East; nor with Menas, Hermogenes and Eugraphus of Alexandria (December 10); nor with Menas, Patriarch of Constantinople (†552, August 25). The Slavonic form Мина is the same in every case, and the Russian bishop is regularly lost among the Greek martyrs in indexes.
- June 20 and July 3 are the same commemoration, the second being the Old Calendar civil equivalent as printed in Russian calendars, not a separate feast.