The Lavra After Euthymius

When Euthymius died on 20 January 473, the lavra he had founded in the desert east of Jerusalem entered a new phase that Cyril of Scythopolis reports the saint himself had foretold: three years after his death the lavra was rebuilt as a coenobium, its scattered cells replaced by a common house, and his relics translated into a new church — the work, Cyril says, of the patriarch Anastasius and the builder Fidus, in fulfillment of Euthymius’s own prophecy. This file traces what became of the lavra after its founder’s death: the burial and the tomb, the conversion from lavra to cenobium, the monastery’s place in the network of Judean houses through late antiquity, and its decline after the Persian (614) and Arab (638) conquests. The site is standardly identified by modern archaeology with Khan el-Ahmar, “the red ruin,” though the identification and some of Cyril’s dates carry the qualifications noted below.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of Palestinian monasticism)

The Death and Burial

Euthymius died on 20 January 473, in extreme old age — Cyril reckons him ninety-six — having governed his desert community for decades and outlived most of the first generation of his monks (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 39–40; trans. Price 1991; on the date and the feast, Feast and Cult). Cyril gives a circumstantial account of the saint’s last days: foreknowing his end, Euthymius gathered his monks, gave them his final charge, named a successor, and prophesied concerning the future of the community before he died (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 39; Price 1991). The patriarch of Jerusalem, Anastasius (in office 458–478), came in person to the desert for the burial, together with a great concourse of monks from the surrounding houses, so that the funeral became a gathering of the whole Judean desert (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 40; Price 1991; Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors, 1994, ch. 6).

Euthymius was buried in the lavra, and Cyril reports the immediate sequel that belongs also to the story of his disciples: his faithful attendant Domitian would not leave the tomb and died beside it on the seventh day, being buried with his master (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 40; Price 1991; this death-vigil is treated, as Cyril’s testimony per METHODOLOGY §3.5, in Sabas and the Next Generation). The tomb at once became the center of the community’s devotion, the focus around which the rebuilding of the monastery would shortly be organized.

The Prophecy and the Conversion into a Cenobium

The most important structural fact about the lavra after Euthymius is that it did not remain a lavra. Cyril reports — and presents as the fulfillment of Euthymius’s own foretelling — that three years after the saint’s death the lavra was converted into a coenobium: the loose federation of solitary cells around a central core, which is what a lavra was, was rebuilt as a single common monastery, with a unified buildings, refectory, and church, in which the monks lived the cenobitic common life rather than the semi-eremitic life of the cell (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 41–42; trans. Price 1991; on the distinction between lavra and cenobium, The Monastic Pattern).

Cyril names the agents of this work. The patriarch Anastasius and a builder named Fidus carried out the construction; Cyril reports that Fidus, who had charge of the building, raised a new church and a cenobitic monastery on the site, and that the body of Euthymius was translated into the new church that was raised over or beside the tomb (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 41–42; Price 1991; Binns 1994, ch. 6; Hirschfeld, The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period, 1992, on the physical conversion of lavras to coenobia). Cyril frames the whole undertaking as the deliberate fulfillment of a prophecy Euthymius had spoken in his lifetime: the founder had foretold that his lavra would become a cenobium, and the event, three years on, made good his word (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 41; Price 1991). The prophecy-and-fulfillment frame is Cyril’s, and the predictive element is reported here as Cyril’s testimony rather than asserted as independently established, in keeping with the methodology that governs the wonders throughout this guide (METHODOLOGY §3.5; see The Miracles).

[Disputed: the dating of the conversion follows Cyril, who places it three years after the death, c. 482 (so the standard reckoning from *Life of Euthymius* 41–42); the patriarch in office through 478 was Anastasius and his successor was Martyrius (478–486), so depending on the exact year the building spanned the reigns, and some accounts associate the completed cenobium with Martyrius's patriarchate rather than Anastasius's. The chronology here follows Cyril's own narrative; the precise regnal attribution is a matter of how his "three years" is counted against the patriarchal succession (cf. Binns 1994, ch. 6).]

The conversion is historically significant beyond this one house. The transformation of lavras into coenobia, and the founding of new houses of both kinds, is a general feature of the Judean desert in the late fifth and sixth centuries, traced in the archaeology by Yizhar Hirschfeld; the rebuilding of Euthymius’s lavra as a cenobium is one of the earliest and best-documented instances of a pattern that recurs across the desert (Hirschfeld 1992, chs. 1–2; Binns 1994, ch. 6). A semi-eremitic lavra suited a founder of Euthymius’s stature, who could govern solitaries by personal authority; after his death the more sustainable institution was the ordered common life of the cenobium, and the community made the change his own prophecy had sanctioned.

The Tomb and the Cult

The translated relics made the monastery a place of pilgrimage and the tomb its devotional heart. Cyril reports miracles at the tomb of Euthymius — healings and answered prayers sought by those who came to it — and these are part of the evidence that the rebuilt cenobium functioned through the Byzantine centuries as a cult-center as well as a working monastery (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 42–60, passim; trans. Price 1991; on the wonders as Cyril’s testimony, The Miracles). The annual commemoration on 20 January was kept at the monastery, and the saint’s office and veneration radiated outward into the wider church of Jerusalem and beyond (on the feast and its spread, Feast and Cult and Veneration).

Cyril himself is a witness to the continuing life of the community. He was a monk of the Judean desert in the second quarter of the sixth century — of Sabas’s New Lavra and then of the Great Lavra — and he wrote the Life of Euthymius in part from what the elders of Euthymius’s own monastery remembered and preserved (Cyril, Life of Euthymius, prologue; Price 1991; Binns 1994, ch. 2). That a coherent and circumstantial memory of the founder survived in the house some eighty years after his death is itself testimony that the cenobium endured as a stable, continuous community across the late fifth and early sixth centuries (on the source, Cyril of Scythopolis’s Life).

The Monastery in the Network of Judean Houses

Euthymius’s cenobium did not stand alone. It was one node in a dense network of monasteries that filled the desert east and southeast of Jerusalem in the Byzantine period — lavras and coenobia strung along the wadis from the Jordan valley to the wilderness of the Kedron, bound together by common discipline, by the movement of monks between them, and by the organization of the whole under the archimandrites of the hermits and the cenobites (Hirschfeld 1992, chs. 1–2; Binns 1994, chs. 5–6). The lower cenobium of Theoctistus lay close by in the same wadi system; Sabas’s Great Lavra and its daughter-houses lay to the south; Gerasimus’s lavra lay toward the Jordan; Theodosius’s great cenobium lay between (on the trio of founders and the shape of the network, The Palestinian Monastic Trinity).

Within this network Euthymius’s house held a particular honor as the foundation of one of the desert’s founding fathers — the generation before Sabas — and as the resting-place of his relics. Its monks belonged to the same Chalcedonian communion that Euthymius had done so much to anchor in the Palestinian desert, and the house shared in the orthodoxy and the institutional order that his disciples, two of whom became patriarchs of Jerusalem, had helped to secure (see Sabas and the Next Generation and, for the conciliar background, Against the Monophysites; on the see, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem). The flourishing of this network through the sixth century is the institutional achievement to which Euthymius’s life ultimately contributed, and his cenobium was one of its honored members (on the period, Pre-Schism Church; on monasticism as such, Monasticism).

The Site: Khan el-Ahmar

The physical site of Euthymius’s monastery is standardly identified by modern scholarship with the ruin known in Arabic as Khan el-Ahmar, “the red ruin” (or “the red khan”), on the road from Jerusalem toward Jericho and the Jordan, east of the city. The identification rests on the excavated remains — a substantial Byzantine monastic complex with a church, tombs, cisterns, and conventual buildings consistent with a coenobium of the period — together with the topographical indications in Cyril, and it is accepted in the standard treatments (Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966, ch. 4; Hirschfeld 1992; Binns 1994, ch. 6).

[Disputed: the identification of Euthymius's monastery with Khan el-Ahmar is the standard scholarly identification, accepted by Chitty (1966) and Hirschfeld (1992) and assumed in Binns (1994); it rests on archaeological survey and excavation combined with the topographical data in Cyril rather than on an inscription naming Euthymius, and so remains an identification — well-founded but not absolutely certain — rather than a documented fact. The reader should hold it as the consensus reconstruction, not as something Cyril's text itself states.]

What excavation has recovered at the site is consistent with Cyril’s account of the conversion: the remains are those of a coenobium with a church built over a burial crypt, the kind of cult-centered common monastery that Cyril says replaced the original lavra (Hirschfeld 1992; Binns 1994, ch. 6). The archaeology thus supplies, with the appropriate caution, a physical counterpart to the literary record of the lavra’s transformation.

Decline: The Persian and Arab Conquests

The end of the great age of the Judean desert came with the upheavals of the seventh century. In 614 the Sasanian Persians under Khosrow II, in alliance with elements hostile to the empire, took Jerusalem, sacking the city and devastating its hinterland; the monasteries of the desert suffered grievously in the invasion, and many monks were killed, a catastrophe remembered in the contemporary literature of the Palestinian church (Chitty 1966, ch. 8; Binns 1994, ch. 1; on the wider devastation, the Capture of Jerusalem of Strategius/Antiochus Strategos). Though Byzantine rule was briefly restored by Heraclius, the recovery was short-lived.

In 638 Jerusalem passed to the Arabs, and Palestine entered the long centuries of Islamic rule under which the Christian monastic population of the desert gradually contracted (Chitty 1966, ch. 8; Binns 1994, ch. 1). Some houses — Mar Saba above all — survived and have remained inhabited to the present day; many others, including Euthymius’s cenobium, declined over the following centuries as the network of Byzantine monasteries that had filled the wadis thinned and, in most cases, fell silent (Hirschfeld 1992, on the post-Byzantine fate of the sites; Chitty 1966, ch. 8). The monastery of Euthymius did not vanish at a single stroke, but with the loss of imperial support, the disruption of pilgrimage, and the slow attrition of the Christian desert under the new order, the great cenobium that had risen over the founder’s tomb in fulfillment of his prophecy eventually fell into the ruin by which modern visitors know its site.

What Endured

The lavra as a building declined; the tradition it served did not. The pattern Euthymius planted passed, through Sabas, into the typikon and the classical monasticism of the Judean desert and, beyond it, into the liturgical and ascetic inheritance of the whole Orthodox world (see Sabas and the Next Generation and St. Sabbas the Sanctified). The relics and the cult kept his memory alive through the Byzantine centuries; Cyril’s Life, written in the community’s own desert, preserved the record after the buildings fell; and the feast on 20 January carried his veneration into the calendars of the whole Church (see Feast and Cult and Legacy and Assessment). The history of the lavra after Euthymius is thus a double story: the institutional house that rose, flourished, and at last declined with the fortunes of Christian Palestine, and the spiritual tradition that outlived every building.

References

Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Euthymius, in Cyril of Scythopolis: The Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Translated by R. M. Price, with introduction and notes by John Binns. Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (Cited by the section numbering of Schwartz’s critical edition, Kyrillos von Skythopolis, 1939. The death of Euthymius on 20 January 473 and the burial in the presence of Patriarch Anastasius, Life of Euthymius 39–40; Domitian’s death at the tomb, Life of Euthymius 40; the prophecy of the conversion and the rebuilding of the lavra as a coenobium by Fidus three years after the death, with the translation of the relics into the new church, Life of Euthymius 41–42; the miracles at the tomb and the continuing life of the community, 42–60 and the prologue.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (Cyril as historian, ch. 2; the organization and network of the desert houses and the conversion of the lavra, chs. 5–6; the seventh-century conquests, ch. 1.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Euthymius’s foundation and its site, ch. 4; the Persian and Arab conquests and the decline of the desert, ch. 8.)
Hirschfeld, Yizhar. The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. (The archaeology of the desert monasteries; the physical conversion of lavras into coenobia; the identification and remains of the site at Khan el-Ahmar; the post-Byzantine fate of the houses.)