Twelve Greeks of the Kiev Caves
The Holy Twelve Greek Master-Builders of the Church of the Dormition of the Kiev Caves
Venerable · d. late 11th century, at the Kiev Caves
Commemorated 14 February — Commemoration of the Greek builders of the Great Church of the Caves
The Twelve Greeks are the company of Byzantine master-builders who, according to the Kiev Caves Patericon, were sent from Constantinople to raise the Great Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God at the Kiev Caves Monastery. The tradition holds that the Theotokos herself appeared to them at the church of Blachernae, gave them gold for the journey and an icon of her Dormition, and sent them to Saints Anthony and Theodosius at Kiev in the year 1073, foretelling that she would be buried — that is, have her church and her wonderworking icon — in that place. The Greek masters built and (with the Greek iconographers who came after them) adorned the cathedral that became the heart of the Lavra and the mother-church of Russian monasticism; and, remaining at the Caves, they received the monastic tonsure, ended their days there, and were numbered among the venerable Fathers of the Caves, in whose Near Caves they rest. They are commemorated on February 14.
The vision at Blachernae
The story of the builders belongs to the cluster of foundation-narratives that the Kiev Caves Patericon gathered around the raising of the monastery's great church, and it is told there with the fullness of a miracle-account. In the days of Saints Anthony and Theodosius, the Patericon relates, master-builders came from Constantinople — the tradition speaks of them as four architects at the first, the received commemoration numbering the whole company of Greek builders as twelve — and told a marvellous tale of their sending. The Queen of Heaven had summoned them to the imperial palace at Blachernae, given them gold sufficient for three years, and an icon of her Dormition to set as the church's patronal image, and had commanded them: "Go, build me a church at Kiev." When they asked in what name and to what measure, she named the Dormition, foretold that Anthony and Theodosius would receive them (though Anthony, she said, would be taken to God before the work was done), and gave them the very relics of martyrs and the measurements of the church, taken — the tradition says — from her own girdle.
The building of the Great Church
Coming to Kiev in 1073, the Greeks found the fathers exactly as the Mother of God had foretold, and the place of the church was marked out by signs from heaven — dew and fire, the Patericon says, showing the ground. There they built the Cathedral of the Dormition (the Uspensky Sobor), the "Great Church" of the Caves, over the following years; it was consecrated after the deaths of both founders, and stood for centuries as the model on whose plan many Russian churches were raised — until its destruction in the twentieth century and its rebuilding in our own day. Greek iconographers and mosaicists followed the builders, drawn by the same wondrous summons, and adorned the church; the Patericon keeps their story beside that of the builders. The Dormition icon the Greeks had carried from Blachernae became one of the great wonderworking icons of the Russian land.
Repose among the Caves Fathers
Their work accomplished, the Greek masters did not return home. They remained at the monastery, embraced the monastic life under the rule of the Caves, and there ended their days, so that the men who had built the shrine became themselves part of its sanctity. They are reckoned among the Venerable Fathers of the Kiev Caves and are commemorated with them; their relics are held to lie in the Near (Anthony's) Caves.
Feast and commemoration
The Twelve Greek builders are commemorated on February 14 (church date; Old Calendar civil February 27), a Russian and Kiev-Caves observance kept by the Russian and Ukrainian Churches and the Orthodox Church in America, and not part of the universal Byzantine calendar. They are honoured also within the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Kiev Caves (of the Near Caves), whose shared hymnody serves their memory; no proper office of the builders as a company is attested.
Iconography
The builders are depicted within the narrative iconography of the founding of the Great Church: the Mother of God at Blachernae handing the Greek masters the gold and the Dormition icon and sending them on their way, and the raising of the cathedral at Kiev — scenes familiar from the illustrated Caves Patericon and from the frescoes of the Lavra. As a distinct company they have no separate portrait type, and no storable pre-modern image identified specifically with the twelve builders has been found; the want is noted here rather than in the shared index.
Disputed questions
- Four or twelve. The Patericon's narrative speaks in the first place of four architects who came from Constantinople, while the liturgical commemoration and the Caves tradition honour twelve Greek builders of the Great Church — the difference between the leaders named in the tale and the full company remembered by the Church. The names of the individual builders are not transmitted; they are venerated as a body.