Eikon

Synaxis of the Fathers of the Kiev Far Caves

The Synaxis of our Venerable Fathers of the Kiev Caves whose relics repose in the Far Caves of Saint Theodosius

Venerable · Bishop · Priest · Deacon · Hieromartyr · Prince · d. 11th–16th century

Commemorated 28 August — Common commemoration of all the fathers whose relics lie in the Far (Theodosian) Caves

On August 28 the Church of the Slavic lands keeps the common commemoration of all the venerable fathers of the Kiev Caves Lavra whose relics rest in the Far Caves — the older name is the Caves of Saint Theodosius, after the co-founder of the monastery who dug and inhabited them. Some fifty and more saints lie there incorrupt: recluses and fasters, canonarchs and gate-keepers, deacons and hieromonks, a hieromartyr, two hierarchs, a prince who died a monk, and archimandrites of the house; between them they span from the eleventh century to the fifteenth. Nearly every one of them has his own day in the year, and this feast neither replaces nor summarises those days: it sets the whole company side by side, as their bodies lie side by side in the corridors under the hill, and confesses that the sanctity of the Lavra is one thing and not fifty. It is the twin of the Synaxis of the Fathers of the Near Caves on September 28, and both are gathered up again in the Synaxis of All the Venerable Fathers of the Kiev Caves kept on the Second Sunday of Great Lent.

The two caves

The monastery on the Dnieper hills began, in the middle of the eleventh century, with a hole in the ground. Antony of the Kiev Caves, returned from Athos, settled in a cave dug in the slope above the river; disciples came; and when the crowding became a burden Antony withdrew to a second cave further off and left the first community under Theodosius. From that division the two cave-systems take their names and their patrons. The northern and upper system, where Antony lies, came to be called the Near Caves or the Caves of Anthony; the southern and lower system, where Theodosius laboured and where the great church of the Nativity of the Theotokos now stands over the entrance, the Far Caves or the Caves of Theodosius. They are not vaults dug for burial but the dwellings of the monks themselves — narrow galleries, cells, chapels and recluse-holes cut in the loess of the hillside, in which men lived and prayed and in which they were left when they died, so that the labyrinth is at once the monastery's first building and its cemetery.

Under the dry, cool, constant conditions of the hill the bodies did not decay. The incorruption of the Caves relics is attested continuously from the middle ages and was already, by the seventeenth century, the chief cause of the Lavra's fame throughout the Orthodox East; the fathers lie in the niches where they were laid, and pilgrims pass along the galleries between them.

The making of the feast

For centuries the fathers of the Caves were venerated locally without a formal act of canonisation — the Kiev Caves Paterikon, compiled in the thirteenth century out of the letters of Bishop Simon and the monk Polycarp, had already made their lives the common reading of the Russian Church. The decisive step was taken by Metropolitan Peter Mogila of Kiev (†1646), who in 1643 proclaimed the general veneration of all the saints resting in the caves and commissioned an office for them; the service was composed at his direction by the Greek theologian Meletios Syrigos. From that act descends every later form of the commemoration.

The single feast was afterwards divided to match the topography, so that each cave-system might be honoured on the day of the saint who founded it and near it: the fathers of the Near Caves on September 28, and the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28. Both dates were settled in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the printed Kiev service books and passed from them into the general Russian calendar; the Church-wide extension of the Caves commemorations beyond the Kiev diocese belongs to the nineteenth century. The Second-Sunday-of-Lent synaxis of all the Caves fathers together, kept on the day of Gregory Palamas, completes the scheme.

The fathers of the Far Caves

The roll below follows the received list of the Kiev service books as kept in current Russian and Ukrainian usage, with each father's own day of commemoration in parentheses. Where an entry already exists in this collection the name is linked; the rest are given as plain text and will be authored on their own principal days. The list is not a closed register — the older Kiev books vary by a name or two, and a few of the fathers are known only by an epithet and a date — but it is stable in substance.

  1. Theodosius, abbot and founder of the caves that bear his name (May 3, August 14, September 2)
  2. Agathon the Wonderworker (February 20)
  3. Acindynus, archimandrite of the Caves (†1235)
  4. Ammon the Recluse (October 4)
  5. Amphilochius, bishop of Vladimir in Volhynia (October 10)
  6. Anatolius the Recluse (July 3)
  7. Aquila the Deacon (January 4)
  8. Arsenius the Lover of Labour (May 8)
  9. Athanasius the Recluse (December 2)
  10. Benjamin the Recluse (October 13)
  11. Cassian the Recluse (February 29, May 8)
  12. Daniel the Elder (14th century)
  13. Dionysius the Recluse, hieromonk (October 3)
  14. Dositheus, archimandrite of the Caves (†1218)
  15. Eulogius the Elder (14th century)
  16. Euthymius, hieroschemamonk (January 20)
  17. Gerontius the Canonarch (April 1)
  18. Gregory the Recluse (January 8, August 8)
  19. Hilarion the Schemamonk (October 21)
  20. Hypatius the Healer (March 31)
  21. Ignatius, archimandrite of the Caves (December 20)
  22. Isidore the Recluse (12th–13th century)
  23. Joseph the Much-Ailing (April 4)
  24. Laurence the Recluse (January 20)
  25. Leontius the Canonarch (April 1, June 18)
  26. Longinus the Gate-Keeper (October 16)
  27. Lucian the Priest, hieromartyr (October 15)
  28. Macarius the Deacon (January 19)
  29. Mardarius the Recluse (December 13)
  30. Martyrius the Recluse (October 25)
  31. Martyrius the Deacon (October 25)
  32. Mercurius the Faster (November 4 and 24)
  33. Moses the Wonderworker (July 26, 28)
  34. Nestor the Unlearned (October 29)
  35. Paisius (July 19)
  36. Pambo the Recluse, hieromonk (July 18)
  37. Pancratius the Recluse, hieromonk (February 9)
  38. Paphnutius the Recluse (February 15)
  39. Paul the Obedient (September 10)
  40. Pimen the Faster, abbot (May 8, August 7)
  41. Pior the Recluse (October 4)
  42. Rufus the Obedient (April 8)
  43. Silvanus the Schemamonk (June 10, July 10)
  44. Sisoes the Schemamonk (July 6)
  45. Sophronius the Recluse (March 11, May 11)
  46. Theodore the Silent (February 17)
  47. Theodosius, in the world Prince Theodore of Ostrog (August 11)
  48. Theophilus, archbishop of Novgorod (October 26)
  49. Timothy, abbot of the Caves (†1132)
  50. Titus the Former Soldier (January 27, February 27)
  51. Zachariah the Faster (March 24)
  52. Zeno the Faster (January 30)

What the list shows is the shape of a monastery rather than a hierarchy of eminence. There are the offices of the choir and the gate — canonarchs, a gate-keeper, deacons; there are the ascetic epithets that a community gives a man and then keeps for six hundred years — the Faster, the Silent, the Obedient, the Lover of Labour, the Much-Ailing, the Unlearned; there are recluses walled into the galleries for decades; there is a hieromartyr; and there are, at either end of the social scale, an unlettered monk who could not read and a prince of Ostrog who laid down his principality for the schema. The Far Caves also received, in the fifteenth century, the exiled archbishop Theophilus of Novgorod, so that the company is not purely Kievan.

Not to be confused with the Near Caves

A number of the Caves fathers bear names, and even epithets, that recur in the other cave-system, and the two lists must be kept apart. The Far Caves have Anatolius the Recluse (July 3) and the Near Caves another Anatolius; the Far Caves have Titus the Former Soldier and the Near Caves Titus the Presbyter, both on February 27; the Far Caves have Arsenius the Lover of Labour and the Near Caves Abramius the Lover of Labour; there is a Macarius the Faster of the Near Caves as well as a Macarius the Deacon here, and a Mercurius of the Near Caves as well as Mercurius the Faster. The general rule is that the Near Caves hold the fathers of the first two generations — Antony, Nestor the Chronicler, Alypius the Iconographer, John the Long-suffering, Prochorus — and the Far Caves the fathers of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, with exceptions in both directions.

Feast and commemoration

August 28 (church date; New Calendar civil August 28; Old Calendar civil September 10), kept in the Russian and Ukrainian Churches and by the OCA; the Greek and Antiochian calendars do not keep it. It falls on the eve of the strict fast of the Beheading of the Forerunner and shares the day with Moses the Ethiopian, whose commemoration is the universal one, and with the uncovering of the relics of Job of Pochaev — three commemorations of monastic repentance and endurance on a single day.

The Caves fathers are commemorated three times in the year: the Far Caves on August 28, the Near Caves on September 28, and all of them together on the Second Sunday of Great Lent, the movable commemoration kept with Gregory Palamas. Each father keeps his own day besides. In the Lavra itself the feast is served in the church of the Nativity of the Theotokos over the Far Caves, with a procession through the galleries.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 4

O ye who dwelt in the caves as in the courts of heaven, and there put on the incorruption that ye now wear in your very bodies, venerable fathers of the Far Caves: ye chose the hidden life and were made manifest to all the earth; wherefore, standing about the throne of the Master whom ye loved, entreat him to have mercy upon our souls.

Original translation from the Slavonic

Kontakion — Tone 8

The choir of the fathers of the Caves of Theodosius we hymn today: for having buried themselves alive for Christ's sake in the darkness of the earth, they shine now like lamps in the light that has no evening, and their bodies, laid up unwasting beneath the hill, are to us a pledge of the resurrection. Wherefore we cry to them: rejoice, unsleeping intercessors for our land.

Original translation from the Slavonic

Iconography

The synaxis is painted in the assembly type common to the Russian sobor icons: the fathers ranged in tiers or in a great arc, all in the monastic mandyas and koukoulion, each named by an inscription and holding a scroll, with Theodosius in the midst or at the head as founder of these caves, and above them the Dormition church of the Lavra or the Mother of God of the Caves enthroned between Antony and Theodosius. The commonest developed form, engraved and printed in great numbers at the Lavra from the eighteenth century onward for pilgrims, shows the hill of Kiev cut away in section: the church above, the galleries below, and in each niche a father lying in his schema with his name beside him — an icon that is also a map of the caves, and the exact visual equivalent of the feast. The companion icon of the Near Caves is composed identically with Antony at the head. Individual fathers keep their own types on their own days.

No pre-1900 image of this synaxis has been located for storage in this collection; the Lavra engravings and sobor panels are old enough to qualify but were not found in a verifiable public-domain reproduction.

Disputed questions

Which caves, and how many fathers? The Kiev books do not always agree on the resting-place of every father, and a few names migrate between the two lists in different recensions; the count of the Far Caves fathers is variously given as forty-five, forty-nine, and (as here) something over fifty. The uncertainty is old and is not concealed in the sources.

Stephen of the Caves. Stephen of the Kiev Caves (†1094), the successor of Theodosius as abbot, founder of the Klov monastery and afterwards bishop of Vladimir in Volhynia, is commemorated on April 27 and October 10 and is sometimes loosely styled "of the Far Caves." He does not appear in the received roll of the Far Caves synaxis: he died bishop of Vladimir and was buried at his own Klov foundation, not in the caves. The Vladimir-Volhynian hierarch who is in this roll is Amphilochius (October 10) — a different man, who shares Stephen's see and his October day, which is very probably the source of the confusion.

Some fathers known only from the list. Acindynus (†1235), Dositheus (†1218), Timothy (†1132), and the elders Daniel and Eulogius have no surviving life beyond their office, a date, and the fact of their relics. They are honoured with the rest; nothing more is asserted of them here than the books assert.

Sources

  1. The Kiev Caves Paterikon (Києво-Печерський патерик), 13th century — the letters of Bishop Simon and the monk Polycarp and the lives of the first generations of the Caves fathers; the foundation of the whole tradition, and the source of the account of Antony's withdrawal and the division of the two cave-systems.
  2. The canonisation act of Metropolitan Peter Mogila of Kiev, 1643, and the office of the Caves fathers composed at his direction by Meletios Syrigos — the institution of the general commemoration from which the two synaxes derive.
  3. The Kiev Caves Lavra service books and Menaion for August 28 — the roll of the fathers of the Far Caves, the proper troparion and kontakion, and the canon.
  4. Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints, August 28 — "Synaxis of the Saints of the Kiev Caves, whose relics repose in the Far Caves of Venerable Theodosius" (consulted live for the roll of names, offices, and individual commemoration days reproduced above).
  5. The saints' own entries in this collection, for the individual lives, dates, and cave-system of each father linked in the roll.