Relics in the Near Caves

St. Anthony of the Kiev Caves (c. 983–1073) died, the chronicle reports, in 1073 at about ninety years of age, and was buried in the cave he had himself dug into the Berestov hill above the Dnieper — the cave-system that became the Near Caves (Blizhnie peshchery), also called the Antoniev caves, of the Monastery of the Caves. Unlike his fellow founder Theodosius, whose relics were uncovered and solemnly translated in 1091, the tradition of the Caves holds that Anthony’s body was never found — that, at his own request, his remains were hidden, reportedly sealed by a collapse of the cave, and so the place of his burial became a hidden shrine. This file sets out the notice of his repose, the burial in the Near Caves, the distinctive “hidden relics” tradition pinned to its sources, and the cave-pilgrimage that became a defining Russian devotion.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Kievan; father of Russian monasticism)

The veneration of Anthony of the Caves differs in one decisive respect from that of almost every other early Russian saint, and the difference governs this whole file: there is no translation of his relics, no uncovering, no shrine displaying an incorrupt body. Where the cult of his co-founder Theodosius is anchored in a datable, witnessed event — the uncovering and translation of the relics on 14 August 1091, narrated by Nestor as a participant — the cult of Anthony is anchored in an absence: a cave whose entrance the tradition says was sealed, a body the tradition says was never found, and a place venerated precisely as the hidden resting-place of the father of the Caves. This file reports the repose and burial as the Russian Primary Chronicle and the Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery attest them, and pins the hidden-relics tradition to the sources that carry it, without asserting as historical fact what is in its nature unverifiable (per METHODOLOGY §3.5, on hagiographical and relic claims pinned to their attestation).

The Repose: 1073

Anthony died, according to the Russian Primary Chronicle, in the year 6581 (= 1073) (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle, 1953, s.a. 1073). The Chronicle’s notice is brief by comparison with the long hagiographical insertion it gives for Theodosius the following year, but it fixes the year of the founder’s death and places it shortly before that of his disciple, so that the two founders of the Caves died within a year or two of one another, Anthony first and Theodosius after him (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle, 1953, s.a. 1073; s.a. 1074 for Theodosius). The liturgical and hagiographical tradition reckons Anthony to have been about ninety years old at his death — a figure consistent with the conventional birth-date of c. 983 at Lyubech (on the early life see Lyubech and the Early Life) and recorded in the later Lives, which speak of him as “having spent ninety years on this earth” (the tradition reflected in the Paterik and in the synaxarial Lives; Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, Harvard, 1989). The great age is part of how the tradition remembers him: the patriarch of Russian monasticism, who had outlived the first generation of his own disciples and seen the cave-settlement grow into a great monastery before he died.

The Paterik surrounds the death with the motifs proper to the founder’s vita — Anthony, the eremite who had withdrawn from the governance of the community he gathered (see Anthony’s Withdrawal), is remembered as foreseeing his end and as dying in the cave to which he had returned. These are the standard marks of holiness the Paterik assigns its founders, and they are reported here as the shape the tradition gave the death, not as independently verifiable detail (Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989; on the Paterik as a source see The Kiev Caves Paterik). What the documentary record establishes is the bare and weighty fact: the founder of the Caves died in 1073, full of years, in the cave-monastery he had begun.

The Burial in the Cave He Had Dug

Anthony was buried where he had lived: in the cave he had himself dug into the hillside above the Dnieper at Berestov, the cave that had been the cradle of the whole monastery. The Caves community had begun precisely as a cave-settlement — Anthony, returned from the Holy Mountain, had taken over and enlarged a cave dug into the wooded hill, and there gathered the first brethren before the community grew too large for the underground dwellings and built a monastery on the surface (see The Cave on the Berestov Hill and, for the larger development, From Hermitage to Monastery). The caves were therefore not merely a burial-place but the original monastery itself, hand-dug by the founders and the first monks; to be buried in them was to be laid in the very ground from which the community had sprung.

This older cave-system — the one associated with Anthony and the first generation — is the complex later known as the Near Caves, the Blizhnie peshchery, and also called the Antoniev (Antonian) caves after the founder buried there, to distinguish it from the Far Caves (Dalnie peshchery) associated with the later anchorites (Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989, on the caves of the monastery). The Near Caves became, over the centuries, the great reliquary of the Caves community: the resting-place of a large number of the monastery’s saints, the “venerable fathers of the Near Caves,” whose incorrupt relics are venerated along the underground galleries. Theodosius, after the translation of 1091 and the later movements of his relics, is reckoned among the fathers of the Near Caves; and the caves take their alternate name, Antoniev, from the founder whose hidden grave the tradition places within them.

The Hidden Relics: A Tradition Pinned to Its Sources

Here the cult of Anthony takes its distinctive form. The Lavra’s tradition is that Anthony’s relics were never found — that, unlike Theodosius’s, his body was never uncovered, never translated, and never displayed. The tradition holds that this was the saint’s own wish: that Anthony asked God that his remains be hidden forever from the eyes of men, and that the wish was granted (the tradition is recorded in the synaxarial Lives and in the cult of the Caves; cf. Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989). One widely transmitted form of the tradition adds a circumstantial detail: that when, after his death, an attempt was made to uncover or reach his body, a collapse of the cave — a fall of earth, or in some tellings a burst of fire or water — sealed the place and turned back those who dug, so that the founder’s grave remained inviolate (this is the tradition as it circulates in the later Lives and in pilgrim accounts of the Near Caves; it is a relic-tradition, reported here as such per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

It is important to mark exactly what kind of claim this is and how it is sourced. The “hidden relics” of Anthony are not a documented archaeological fact but a tradition of the cult, transmitted in the hagiographical and devotional literature of the Caves and in the synaxarial Lives that depend on it, where it is summarized in such terms as: Anthony “asked that his remains be forever hidden from the eyes of men. His desire was fulfilled. He is said to have been buried in the cave where he reposed, but his relics have never been found” (the formulation of the synaxarial tradition; cf. the Lives of the Caves saints and Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989, for the milieu). The tradition is therefore reported here in the form the tradition itself takes — “the Lavra’s tradition is that…”, “tradition holds that…” — and not asserted as a verified event. What can be said at the documentary level is only this: that there is no record of a translation of Anthony’s relics comparable to the witnessed translation of Theodosius’s in 1091, and that the cult of Anthony from an early period venerated him at a hidden grave rather than at a displayed shrine.

The Contrast with Theodosius

The contrast with his co-founder is exact and instructive, and the two cults must be carefully distinguished. Theodosius’s relics WERE uncovered and translated: on 14 August 1091, the eve of the Dormition, the brethren of the Caves opened the cave where Theodosius had been buried in 1074, found the body (the tradition says) incorrupt and fragrant, and carried it up into the great Dormition (Uspensky) cathedral, where it was laid near the doors — an event the Russian Primary Chronicle records under that year and which Nestor narrates as one who took part (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle, 1953, s.a. 1091; Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989). Theodosius thus acquired a translation-feast (14 August), a fixed shrine, and a displayed relic; and from the translation his cult took the form usual for a Russian monastic saint.

Anthony’s cult took the opposite form. There is no s.a. 1091 for Anthony, no uncovering, no translation-feast of his relics, no shrine displaying his body. The tradition is precisely that his grave remained closed, and his body unseen. The two founders, complementary in life — Anthony the eremite who dug the caves, Theodosius the cenobiarch who built the monastery (the relationship treated in section 08 of this collection) — remain complementary in death: the one venerated at a translated and displayed shrine, the other at a hidden and inviolate grave. The very absence of Anthony’s relics became, in the devotion of the Caves, a sign of his eremitic self-effacement — the founder who had withdrawn from leadership in life withdrawing, in death, even from the gaze of the pilgrims who came to honor him.

This distinction matters not only as hagiography but as a guard against a common conflation: it is sometimes loosely said that “the relics of Anthony and Theodosius rest in the Near Caves,” and Theodosius’s relics are indeed venerated there, but the careful tradition is that Anthony’s own remains were never found, so that what the Near Caves preserve of him is a hidden grave and a memory, not a displayed relic (per METHODOLOGY §3.5; the relic-tradition is pinned and not asserted as fact).

The Cave-Pilgrimage as a Defining Russian Devotion

Whatever the status of the founder’s own relics, the caves themselves became one of the central pilgrimage devotions of Russian Orthodoxy, and Anthony stands at the head of that devotion as the man who first dug into the hill. The Near Caves and the Far Caves of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra are a labyrinth of narrow underground galleries lined with the relics of the monastery’s saints — the “venerable fathers of the Caves” — many of them displayed, by long custom, as incorrupt remains in the cool, dry passages. To descend into the caves, taper in hand, and to venerate the relics of the fathers one by one along the galleries became, over the centuries, a defining act of Russian piety: a pilgrimage to the underground heart of the monastery that the Russian tradition calls the mother of Russian monasteries (Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989, on the caves and the fathers buried in them; on the wider devotion see Orthodoxy Guide: Russian Monasticism).

The caves gave the devotion its peculiar character. Where a Greek or Athonite pilgrim venerated relics in a church, the Caves pilgrim went underground, into the very cells and tombs the first monks had dug, and walked the galleries that were themselves the original monastery. The form of the devotion thus preserved, physically, the eremitic and subterranean origins that Anthony had given the community: the pilgrim’s path retraced the founder’s own descent into the hill. The collective liturgical commemorations of the Caves saints — the synaxes of the fathers of the Near and Far Caves, and the general synaxis of all the venerable fathers of the Caves — gather this devotion into the calendar, honoring not isolated saints but the whole company of the holy fathers who lie in the caves (the synaxes are treated, with the feast-days, in Father of Russian Monasticism).

That the founder’s own grave is, by the tradition, hidden among them only deepens the devotion’s character: the pilgrim venerates the displayed relics of Anthony’s spiritual children while passing near the unseen resting-place of their father. The Caves devotion is, in this sense, Anthony’s most enduring relic — not a body, but a place and a practice, the pilgrimage into the hill he first opened, which has drawn the faithful for the better part of a millennium and continues, through every vicissitude of the monastery’s history, to draw them still.

References

The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. (Repose of Anthony, s.a. 6581 = 1073; repose of Theodosius, s.a. 1074; translation of Theodosius’s relics, s.a. 1091.)
Heppell, Muriel, trans. The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. (The founders, the caves, the fathers of the Near Caves, and the milieu of the cult.)
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Anthony and Theodosius and the early Caves community.)
The Lives of the Saints of the Kiev Caves and the synaxarial tradition (as summarized in the liturgical Lives and the menaion for 10 July, 2 September, and 28 September). (The “hidden relics” tradition: that Anthony asked his remains be hidden and that they were never found; reported per METHODOLOGY §3.5 as a tradition of the cult, not as documented fact.)