Theodore and Basil of the Kiev Caves
Our Venerable Martyrs Theodore and Basil of the Caves, who suffered in the Varangian Cave
Venerable Martyr · d. 1098, Kiev
Commemorated 11 August — Their martyrdom under Prince Mstislav Svyatopolkovich, 28 September — Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves
Theodore and Basil were monks of the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev who were tortured to death in 1098 by Prince Mstislav Svyatopolkovich over a hoard of buried treasure that Theodore had found, renounced, and reburied — and whose hiding-place God had taken from his memory. Their story, told at length in the Paterikon of the Caves, is one of the most sharply drawn narratives of early Russian monasticism: an account of the demon of avarice working first through a lie and then through a prince, of a friendship that held under torture, and of a dying man's prophecy that the arrow shot into him would return to the archer. Within a year the prince was killed by that arrow at the walls of Vladimir-Volynsky. The two rest in the Near (Antony's) Caves and are commemorated on August 11.
The Varangian Cave
Theodore was a man of substance in Kiev who, coming to the monastery of Saints Antony and Theodosius, gave away his goods to the poor and was tonsured. He was given as his cell a part of the ancient system of galleries under the hill called the Varangian Cave — so named because, in the memory of the city, Northmen had once used it, and because treasure was believed to have been hidden there in the old days before the monastery came.
His fellow in the cave, and the elder of his soul, was the monk Basil, a man of settled and cheerful poverty. The two lived together in the manner of the first Caves fathers: at handwork, at psalmody, at long silence.
The temptation of the treasure
After some years the demon of avarice — the specific enemy of the man who has given away a great deal — began to work in Theodore. He was made to remember what he had renounced, to calculate what it would have been worth, to reflect that he had provided nothing for his old age and that his almsgiving had been improvident. The regret grew until it filled his prayer.
Basil met it with the classical remedy: he would not argue with the thought, but he refused to let his brother be alone with it, and he set him to work. Theodore took to grinding grain by night for the whole brotherhood — the heaviest and least regarded labour of the house, done in the dark when no one could praise it — and by that hidden work the passion for possessions was broken.
The enemy then changed his ground. The treasure of the Varangians was uncovered in the cave: gold vessels and coin, a real hoard, of the kind the cave's name promised. Theodore saw it, understood at once what a second temptation it was, and with Basil's counsel buried it again, in a place he told to no one; and he prayed that the memory of the place might be taken from him. It was: he could not afterwards say where he had put it. Basil was then sent away from the monastery for a time on obedience, and in his absence the demon appeared to Theodore in Basil's own shape and in Basil's voice, urging him to dig up the gold and go free; but the deceit was uncovered when the real Basil returned and denied ever having said such a thing.
Prince Mstislav and the torture
The rumour of the gold reached the city and at last the court. Mstislav Svyatopolkovich, son of the Grand Prince Svyatopolk Izyaslavich, had Theodore seized and brought before him, and demanded the treasure. Theodore answered with the plain truth, which sounded like the plainest of lies: he had seen much gold and vessels in the cave, and he and Basil had buried them again to be rid of the temptation, and God had taken from him the memory of where the place was.
The prince, believing himself mocked, had him beaten until the hair-shirt on his back was soaked with blood, then hung him over a fire in the smoke until his beard and hair were burned away. Theodore did not change his answer. Basil was fetched and put to the same questions with the same result; and the prince, who had been drinking, took a bow and shot him. Basil drew the arrow out of his own body and spoke the words for which the Paterikon remembers him: by this arrow thou thyself shalt be wounded. Both monks died of their torments that night, in 1098, and the brethren buried them in the Near Caves.
The arrow
On 15 July 1099, in the campaign in Volhynia, Mstislav was standing on the wall of Vladimir-Volynsky during the siege when an arrow shot from below struck him under the breast. The chroniclers record the death; the Paterikon records what the prince said as he drew the shaft out and looked at it — that he was dying for the monks Theodore and Basil, and that this was the arrow. The narrative and the chronicle agree on the date and the manner of his death, which is the one point at which the story of the two martyrs touches the public record of Rus.
Relics and veneration
The relics of both rest in the Near (Antony's) Caves of the Kiev Caves Lavra, where they have been shown and venerated continuously since the Middle Ages; the Varangian Cave itself remained a part of the shown galleries. They are named in the office of the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves (September 28) as well as on their own day, and their tale is among those most often excerpted from the Paterikon — in the Russian tradition it became the standard preaching text on avarice, the vice which the Paterikon treats as the specific temptation of the man who has already given everything away.
Feast and commemoration
August 11 (church date; New Calendar civil August 11, Old Calendar civil August 24), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and the Dormition Fast (August 1–14). They are also named in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves on September 28, and in the general commemoration of All the Saints of the Caves on the second Sunday of Great Lent.
The commemoration is Russian and Ukrainian in transmission and is kept in the Orthodox Church in America's calendar; it is not in the Greek or Antiochian books, which have no Kievan proper for the day.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of venerable martyrs)
Ye dwelt in the caves of the earth as in the courts of heaven, O Theodore and Basil, and having cast away the gold that perisheth, ye laid up for yourselves the treasure that cannot be found out; wherefore, when the prince demanded of you what God had hidden, ye gave him your blood instead of gold. O venerable martyrs, intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
The two are painted together, as they are commemorated: two monks standing side by side in the black mandyas and koukoulion of the Great Schema, with the long unkempt beards and hollow faces of the Caves fathers, holding crosses in their right hands as martyrs and, one of them, a scroll. Where they are distinguished, Basil is the elder and grey, and may be shown with an arrow — either held as the instrument of his passion or still standing in his breast; Theodore is the younger and dark-bearded. Narrative scenes drawn from the Paterikon show three episodes: Theodore grinding grain by night at the hand-mill, Theodore hanging in the smoke above the fire before the prince, and — the most often painted — Basil drawing the arrow from his own body and pointing it at Mstislav. In the great composite icons of All the Saints of the Kiev Caves, which arrange the fathers in ranks about the Dormition church, both appear among the martyrs of the Near Caves.
No pre-1900 image of the two has been stored. A painting on Wikimedia Commons showing two Caves monks flanking the enthroned Theotokos was fetched and examined for this entry and rejected: the file page dates it "medieval" and attributes it to "an unknown monk," but the work is plainly a nineteenth- or twentieth-century academic oil in the Lavra's late manner, its dedicatory cartouches are illegible at the resolution available, and the identity of the two figures therefore cannot be confirmed against the file page's own unreliable dating. The Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort, covers only September to February and in any case predates these saints.
Disputed questions
- The year. The Paterikon does not date the martyrdom; the calendars enter it under 1098, working back from the death of Mstislav in July 1099, which the chronicles fix. The interval implied — the martyrdom shortly before the prince's own death — is the narrative's, and a date of 1098 or early 1099 is equally defensible.
- Which Mstislav. The prince of the story is Mstislav Svyatopolkovich, a son of Grand Prince Svyatopolk II Izyaslavich, who held Vladimir-Volynsky and died at its siege in 1099. He is not to be confused with his far more famous contemporary Mstislav Vladimirovich the Great (†1132), son of Vladimir Monomakh, who is himself honoured as a saint. English retellings of the Paterikon story sometimes omit the patronymic and so invite the confusion.
- The character of the source. The Paterikon of the Caves is a monastic collection built up from the early twelfth century onward out of the letters of Bishop Simon of Vladimir and the monk Polycarp, and it is didactic before it is documentary: the tale of Theodore and Basil is shaped throughout by its lesson about avarice and the demon's impersonations. Its coincidence with the chronicle on Mstislav's death is nevertheless exact, and there is no reason to doubt that two monks of the house died at a prince's hands in these years.