Pambo of the Kiev Caves
Our Venerable Father Pambo the Recluse, Hieromonk of the Far Caves of Kiev
Venerable · Confessor · Priest · d. 1241, at the Caves monastery of Kiev
Commemorated 18 July — Repose in the Far Caves, 28 August — Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves
Pambo the Recluse was a hieromonk of the Caves monastery at Kiev who was taken captive by the Tatars in the years of the Mongol conquest, held and tortured for refusing to renounce Christ, and — the tradition of the Lavra says — carried back miraculously into his own cell. He ended his life in enclosure and reposed in 1241, the year after the fall of Kiev. His relics rest in the Far Caves, those of St Theodosius, and he is commemorated on July 18, the same day as his namesake Pambo of Nitria, for whom he was named.
The Caves under the Mongol conquest
Pambo was a priest-monk of the Monastery of the Caves, the house of Antony and Theodosius, in the generation that saw it destroyed. Kiev fell to Batu Khan on 6 December 1240; the Tithe Church collapsed on the people sheltering in it, the city was sacked, and the monastery was plundered and its community scattered or taken. Of the monks of the Caves who are individually remembered from those years, Pambo is the one remembered for having been taken alive.
Captivity and confession
He was seized, the account says, while out of the monastery on an obedience laid on him by the brotherhood. His captors pressed him to abandon the Christian faith and accept theirs, and, when he would not, tormented him over a long period — the notices do not itemise the tortures, but they make it plain that his captivity was a sustained attempt to break his confession, and that it failed. He answered them, and went on answering them, with the confession of Christ.
The return to the cell
The tradition transmitted at the Lavra is that Pambo was not ransomed and did not escape: he was taken up from his imprisonment and set down in his own cell in the monastery, still wearing the marks of what had been done to him. Whatever lies behind the account — and the monastery's own memory of these years was gathered in conditions of ruin — the story is the reason he is counted a confessor and not merely a monk who survived: the community understood his return as God's seal on a confession made under torture.
Repose and relics
He lived out what remained to him in seclusion, and reposed in 1241. His relics are laid in the Far Caves, the caves of St Theodosius, where they are venerated still, and he is numbered in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves (August 28) and in the general synaxis of the Caves fathers on the second Sunday of Great Lent.
Feast and commemoration
July 18 (church date; New Calendar civil July 18, Old Calendar civil July 31), with the Synaxis of the Fathers of the Far Caves on August 28 and the movable Caves synaxis of the second Sunday of Great Lent. The commemoration is Russian and Ukrainian and is carried by the OCA; the Greek calendars of July 18 keep only the Egyptian Pambo.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
In thee, O Father, was preserved unimpaired that which is according to the image; for taking up thy cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Pambo, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Pambo is painted among the fathers of the Far Caves: an aged monk in the mandyas and hood, a scroll or a prayer-rope in his hand, and — where his story is told rather than merely his person shown — the fetters of his captivity at his feet. He appears in the large seventeenth- and eighteenth-century engraved plates of the Caves saints, in which the whole company of the Far Caves is ranged in rows with each name inscribed beside its figure; these plates are the ordinary source for the iconography of the minor Caves fathers. No pre-1900 image of Pambo of the Caves alone has been located for this collection; searches under both his Slavonic and his Greek name return nothing, and the group plates found were not identifiable at the level of the individual figure.
Disputed questions
- The record is thin. Pambo's memory does not stand in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century layers of the Kiev Caves Paterikon but in the later monastic tradition of the Lavra, gathered and printed in the seventeenth century when the relics of the Far Caves were catalogued and their lives compiled. The date 1241 and the fact of a Tatar captivity are the substance of it; the manner of his return belongs to the monastery's own tradition and is transmitted as such.
- Not to be confused with Pambo of Nitria, the Egyptian father of the fourth century, whose feast falls on the same day and whose name this Pambo bears; English calendars frequently print one line for "Venerable Pambo" and lose one of the two. The Kievan Pambo also shares his day, his house and his century's calamities with John the Long-suffering of the Near Caves, who died eighty years before the Mongols came.