Theodore of Ostrog
Our Venerable Father Theodore, Prince of Ostrog, of the Caves, in schema Theodosius
Venerable · Prince · d. c. 1483, Kiev
Commemorated 11 August — Commemoration of the prince-monk of the Far Caves, 28 August — Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves
Theodore, Prince of Ostrog in Volhynia, was the founder of the house of Ostrozhsky and one of the great Orthodox magnates of the fifteenth-century Grand Duchy of Lithuania: a soldier of the wars against the Teutonic Order and in the Hussite campaigns, a builder of churches, and — at a moment when Latin pressure on the Orthodox of Volhynia and Galicia was at its heaviest — a lay defender of his people's faith who had the standing to be heard. About 1441 he laid down his principality, went to the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev, and was tonsured with the schema-name Theodosius, living out his years as a monk. He reposed in the second half of the century, by tradition about 1483, and his relics were found incorrupt in the Far (Theodosius's) Caves, where they rest. He was venerated as a saint by the end of the sixteenth century, and is commemorated on August 11.
Prince of Ostrog
Theodore, son of Daniel, took his name from the town of Ostrog on the Horyn in Volhynia, the seat granted to his family and the origin of the surname that his descendants would make one of the most powerful in the lands of the Rus under Lithuanian and then Polish rule. In the course of a long career he held, besides Ostrog, the towns of Zaslav, Koretz, Khlapotyn and Krasilov with their districts, and stood among the first men of the Grand Duchy.
He belonged, that is, to the last generation of Orthodox princes in those lands who were still unquestionably Orthodox. The Union of Krewo (1385) and the conversion of the dynasty had opened a long competition for the allegiance of the Ruthenian nobility, in which the pressure to conform to Rome came with lands, offices and the right to sit in council; within four generations most of the great houses had gone over. Theodore did not, and his principal fame in the Orthodox memory of Volhynia is that he used his position to protect the Church: building and endowing churches in his towns, sheltering clergy, and opposing the extension of Latin jurisdiction in his lands at a time when there was every worldly reason to acquiesce.
The soldier
His public life ran through the central military events of his age. He fought in the wars against the Teutonic Order, in the campaigns that broke the Order's power in the first decades of the fifteenth century; and in the 1430s he took part in the Hussite wars, serving in the expeditions in which Ruthenian and Lithuanian troops under Sigismund Korybut were engaged in Bohemia. In the internal wars of the Grand Duchy he held to Švitrigaila, the prince whose cause was in large part the cause of the Orthodox nobility, and his career suffered accordingly and recovered.
The renunciation
About 1441 — the year most often given — Theodore did what a prince of his standing was not expected to do: he resigned everything. He handed his principality to his heirs, left Volhynia, and came to the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev, the mother house of monasticism in the Rus, and asked for the tonsure. He received it with the schema-name Theodosius, after the great founder in whose caves he was to live.
Nothing of his monastic life is recorded except its length and its ordinariness, which is the point of it. The tradition says only that he pursued the ascetic labour for the salvation of his soul until his repose to God — the formula the Paterikon uses of the fathers whose struggle left no anecdotes. He is remembered as the prince who ended as a monk with no privileges, in a cave, under obedience.
Relics and glorification
He died in the second half of the fifteenth century; the date transmitted in the Lavra is about 1483. His body was laid in the Far Caves, the galleries of St Theodosius, and was later found incorrupt. By the end of the sixteenth century he was venerated as a saint of the monastery and named among its fathers — a recognition that came at exactly the moment when his own great-grandson's generation was fighting the same battle he had fought.
The house he founded reached its height in Constantine (Vasyl-Kostiantyn) of Ostrog (1526–1608), voivode of Kiev, the greatest lay patron the Orthodox of the Commonwealth ever had, who founded the Ostrog Academy and paid for the Ostrog Bible of 1581, the first complete printed Church Slavonic Bible; and who led the Orthodox opposition to the Union of Brest in 1596. That the founder of the dynasty was by then venerated as a monk-saint in the Caves was not lost on either side of that argument.
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). He is commemorated again on August 28 in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves, and with all the fathers of the Caves on the second Sunday of Great Lent.
The commemoration belongs to the Russian and Ukrainian calendars and to the Orthodox Church in America; it is naturally strongest in Volhynia, where his towns and foundations are, and at the Kiev Caves Lavra, where his relics rest.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
Thou didst exchange a princedom for a cave and an inheritance for a cell, O father Theodore, and having defended the faith of thy fathers among the mighty, thou didst flee from the honour of men to the labour of monks; wherefore, having found the treasure that abideth, thou dost intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Theodore is painted in the manner reserved for princes who became monks, and the interest of his type lies precisely in the doubling. The commoner form shows him as a monk of the schema — the black mandyas and pointed koukoulion, a long grey beard, a scroll in the left hand and the right raised in blessing or holding a cross — with only the inscription naming him prince of Ostrog to record what he had been. The other form, favoured in Volhynian painting and in the Ostrozhsky family's own commissions, shows him in princely dress: the fur-trimmed caftan and the cap of a Ruthenian prince, sometimes with a church held in his hands as its builder and founder, the ktetor's gesture. A third and later type combines them, giving him the schema over the princely garments or setting the discarded cap and sword at his feet.
He appears in the composite icons of All the Saints of the Kiev Caves, ranked among the fathers of the Far Caves on the side of St Theodosius. No pre-1900 image of him alone has been located for this collection; the Menologion of Basil II, the first resort for the fixed year, is four centuries earlier than the saint and in any case covers only September to February.
Disputed questions
- The date of death is not fixed. The Lavra tradition and most calendars give c. 1483; the older accounts say only "the second half of the fifteenth century," and some place his repose considerably earlier, soon after his tonsure. The entry follows the calendars while recording the uncertainty.
- The tonsure name. He is entered in the calendars as Theodore, his princely name, but the relics in the Far Caves and the monastery's own lists call him Theodosius, the name he received with the schema. Both are used; the calendars usually print "the venerable Theodore, Prince of Ostrog," and add the schema-name in a parenthesis, which is the practice followed here.
- Which battles. The details of his military career — Grunwald, the Hussite campaigns, the wars of Švitrigaila — come from the secular chronicles and genealogies of the Ostrozhsky house rather than from any life of the saint, and the attributions vary from one account to another. What is common to all of them is the shape: a long, prominent, martial and political career, abruptly abandoned.
- Not to be confused with Basil of Ostrog (†1671), the Serbian wonderworker and Metropolitan of Zahumlje whose relics lie at the monastery of Ostrog in Montenegro. The two Ostrogs are different places in different countries, and the two saints have nothing in common but the name of a rock. The confusion is easy to make in English and is worth guarding against: Ostroh in Volhynia (Ukraine) is Theodore's; Ostrog in Montenegro is Basil's.