Mercurius of the Kiev Near Caves
Our Father among the Saints Mercurius, Bishop of Smolensk, of the Near Caves of Kiev
Bishop · Venerable · d. 1239, at Smolensk
Commemorated 7 August — Principal commemoration of the bishop-monk of the Near Caves, 24 November — Kept with his patron, the Great-Martyr Mercurius of Caesarea
Mercurius was a monk of the Kiev Caves who was taken from the cave to the episcopal throne of Smolensk, and who died in his city under the Tatar sword — by the Russian reckoning in 1239, in the aftermath of Batu's invasion of Rus'. The tradition preserves one wholly characteristic detail: dying, he directed that his body be laid in a coffin and set adrift on the Dnieper, to be buried wherever it should come to land; the coffin floated down to the Caves monastery at Kiev, his own house of profession, and he was laid in the Near (Antoniev) Caves, where his relics rest. His memory is kept on August 7, and again on November 24 with the great-martyr whose name he bore.
The monk of the Caves
Nothing is transmitted of Mercurius' origins. He appears in the record already as a monk of the Caves monastery at Kiev, and the notices agree in describing him as a strict keeper of the fasts — the one ascetic detail preserved, and the reason he is sometimes styled a faster. The Caves tradition further remembers a close spiritual friendship between him and Paisius of the Far Caves, of the sort the Paterikon records for pairs of monks who shared a cell and were laid in one grave; their relics were afterwards separated into two reliquaries.
Bishop of Smolensk
From the monastery he was called to the episcopate, and became bishop of Smolensk, succeeding (as the Russian notices reckon it) Bishop Lazarus. Smolensk in the thirteenth century was one of the great western principalities of Rus', on the upper Dnieper, with an old and wealthy see.
Death under the Tatars, and the coffin on the Dnieper
He shared the fate of his flock. The Russian tradition places his death in the Tatar devastation, and he was killed in or about his city. What is remembered after that is his dying instruction: that his body be placed in a coffin and committed to the Dnieper, and buried wherever the river carried it. The coffin came down the river to the Kiev Caves monastery — a distance of several hundred versts — and there the brethren received it and buried him in the Near Caves of Saint Anthony, in which cave-church his relics are venerated to this day. The motif is a familiar one in Rus' hagiography, and its point is not the marvel of the voyage but the bishop's judgement that his true home was the monastery and not the cathedral.
Feast and commemoration
August 7 (church date; New Calendar civil August 7, Old Calendar civil August 20), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition fast (August 1–14). A second commemoration falls on November 24, the day of the Great-Martyr Mercurius of Caesarea, his name-saint. He is counted among the fathers of the Kiev Caves kept on the second Sunday of Great Lent, and, as a Smolensk hierarch, among the Synaxis of the Saints of Smolensk. The veneration is Russian and Ukrainian; the Greek books do not keep him.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable hierarch of the Caves)
Having loved the silence of the caves, thou wast called from it to shepherd the flock of Smolensk, and didst lay down thy life for it in the day of the barbarian; and the river bore thee back, O holy father Mercurius, to the house of thy repentance. Entreat Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Mercurius is painted as a hierarch-monk: in the phelonion and omophorion with the schema visible beneath, blessing and holding the Gospel, or — in the Caves compositions, where he stands in the great assembly of the Antoniev fathers — in mantle and koukoulion with the mitre. Where a scene is given him it is the coffin on the Dnieper, borne downstream past the wooded bluffs to the gates of the Lavra, with the monks coming down to the water to receive it. No pre-1900 image identified specifically as this Mercurius — rather than the soldier-martyr of the same city, whose seventeenth-century icon is well known — has been located for this repository, and the risk of storing the wrong Mercurius of Smolensk is high enough that none has been stored.
Disputed questions
This is one of the more tangled identity-knots in the Russian calendar, and the entry states the problem rather than resolving it.
- Not to be confused with Mercurius of Smolensk, the soldier-martyr of Smolensk (†c. 1238, feast November 24), who was sent out from before the wonderworking Smolensk icon to meet the Tatar host at Dolgomostye and was beheaded in the victory. The two are separate persons — a bishop and a layman-soldier — but they share a name, a city, a decade, a Tatar enemy and the November 24 commemoration, and calendars regularly print them on the same days. Some lists compound the confusion by carrying the soldier-martyr on August 7 as well; the August 7 saint proper is the bishop, and this entry keeps the soldier-martyr's fixed feast at November 24 alone.
- Not to be confused with the great-martyr Mercurius of Caesarea (†c. 250, November 24), the bishop's own patron saint — which is precisely why the bishop is also kept on November 24.
- Not to be confused with the third Caves Mercurius, Mercurius the Faster of the Far Caves (fourteenth century, November 24), Paisius' cell-companion, who has no entry here yet. It is an open question — and it is genuinely open — whether the friendship with Paisius belongs to that Mercurius rather than to the bishop; the OCA's own August 7 notice attaches the Paisius friendship, the Far Caves, the fourteenth century and the epithet "faster" to the bishop of Smolensk, while burying him in the Near Caves, which cannot all be true at once. The likeliest reading is that two Caves Mercurii — a thirteenth-century bishop in the Near Caves and a fourteenth-century faster in the Far Caves — have been partly merged in the later synaxaria.
- The year and the invader. Russian usage gives 1239, when Batu's armies were in the Chernigov and Smolensk lands; some notices instead write 1347 and still name Batu, who died in 1255. The 1347 date is followed here only as an error to be noted, not as a variant to be weighed.