Building the Monastery

The physical and institutional building-up of the Caves monastery under Theodosius: the move from the cramped underground caves to buildings above ground, the enlargement of cells and the raising of a wooden church and refectory, the organization of monastic offices, the grant of land by Prince Svyatoslav, and the laying of the foundation of the great Dormition (Uspensky) cathedral that would be completed after his death. This file distinguishes what is securely datable from the Paterik‘s celebrated but legendary account of the cathedral’s miraculous founding — the Greek master-builders, the relics, the divinely measured site — which is reported here as the Paterik’s tradition, not as historical fact.

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

From Underground to Above Ground

The decisive material change of Theodosius’s abbacy was the monastery’s emergence from the earth. The community had begun as a system of caves — the very word that names the monastery, Pecherskaya (of the caves), preserves its origin — and through Anthony’s years and the first growth under Varlaam the monks lived, prayed, and buried their dead in galleries dug into the Berestovo hillside above the Dnieper (The Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The caves served a small, semi-eremitic band; they could not house the populous cenobium that gathered under Theodosius, whose numbers Nestor reports rose to about a hundred brethren (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, in Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, 1948). The pressure of numbers, together with the demands of the fully communal Studite rule that Theodosius adopted — a common refectory and common offices require buildings, not burrows — drove the move to the surface.

Both the Primary Chronicle and Nestor’s Life record the transition in the same terms. When the brethren could no longer be contained underground, Theodosius, with Anthony’s blessing, led them up onto the open hill above the caves; there they built a church and erected cells, and set a palisade or fence around the new buildings, so that the monastery took on the form of a settled cenobium rather than a network of hermit-galleries (The Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948). The first church above ground was of wood and was dedicated, like the great stone cathedral that would later replace it, to the Dormition of the Mother of God (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989). The caves themselves were not abandoned: they continued to be used for solitary asceticism by individual monks and, above all, as the burial-place of the brethren, the function that would make them in later centuries the famous relic-galleries of the Lavra (on the relics, see Canonization and Relics). But the center of gravity of the community’s daily life shifted decisively to the surface buildings.

This move is conventionally dated to the same period as Theodosius’s accession to the abbacy. [Disputed: the *Primary Chronicle* narrates the move above ground within its retrospective block placed s.a. 1051 (Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953), without an exact year; scholarship associates the transition with the early 1060s, around the time Theodosius became hegumen (c. 1062), so that the surface monastery and the cenobitic rule belong together as the work of his first years as superior — see Fedotov, *The Russian Religious Mind* I (1946), and Franklin & Shepard, *The Emergence of Rus* (1996)].

Cells, Church, and Refectory: The Cenobitic Plant

The new buildings were not merely larger lodgings; they were the physical apparatus that a coenobium requires. The enlargement and multiplication of cells gave each monk a place within an ordered settlement rather than a niche in a cave-wall. The raising of the wooden Dormition church gave the community a single common space for the daily round of services that the Studite typikon prescribed. And the building of a refectory (trapeza) gave it a common table — the visible sign of the cenobitic principle that the monks held all things in common and ate together, which the cave-life could never have sustained (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; on the rule itself, see The Shape of Cenobitic Life).

Nestor’s Life connects the building program directly to the introduction of the rule: Theodosius is shown obtaining a copy of the Studite typikon of Constantinople and ordering the whole life of the monastery — liturgical, dietary, and administrative — according to it, and the construction of refectory and church is the material counterpart of that ordering (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; Heppell 1989). The repeated scenes of Theodosius’s own manual labor in the Life — carrying water, cutting and hauling wood, working in the bakery — belong to this period of building and provisioning, and Nestor presents the abbot as laboring at the construction and supply of the monastery alongside the brethren rather than directing it from a distance (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948). The details of his leadership by example are treated in the companion file (see Election as Hegumen).

The Organization of Offices

Building the monastery meant building its administration. A community of a hundred living a fully common life needed officers, and Nestor’s Life shows Theodosius establishing the monastic offices that the Studite rule defined. Chief among them was the cellarer (kelar), the monk charged with the stores and the provisioning of the house — the office whose proper exercise the Life illustrates in several episodes turning on the abundance or scarcity of bread, wine, and oil in the monastery’s stores (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; Heppell 1989). Alongside the cellarer the cenobitic order required officers for the refectory, the church, the gate, and the discipline of the brethren, and the Life assumes such a structure throughout its account of the monastery’s daily working (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948).

The significance of this is more than administrative housekeeping. In establishing a defined hierarchy of offices under the rule, Theodosius created the template of organized cenobitic government that Russian monasticism would inherit. The Caves monastery became, in Fedotov’s phrase, the mother of the Russian monastic ideal precisely because it was the first to combine the ascetic intensity of the caves with the disciplined common order of a Studite coenobium, offices and all (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind I, 1946; and see Russian Monasticism and Monasticism).

The Grant of Land by Prince Svyatoslav

The expansion above ground required ground to expand onto, and here the monastery passed from the private austerity of the cave-founders into the public world of princely patronage. The Primary Chronicle and the tradition preserved in the Paterik record that the hill above the caves was given to the monastery by a prince: Svyatoslav Yaroslavich, who held Kiev after the expulsion of his brother Izyaslav, granted the monks the land on which the new monastery and its great church would stand (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Heppell 1989; cf. The Russian Primary Chronicle, building entries, Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The same prince is remembered as a benefactor of the monastery’s construction, contributing to the cost of the great cathedral whose foundation was laid in his reign (Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989).

The relationship was not simple. Theodosius is famous in Nestor’s Life for his outspoken rebuke of Svyatoslav over the seizure of the throne from his elder brother Izyaslav — the abbot refused at first to commemorate the usurping prince in the monastery’s prayers and reproached him to his face — and the monastery’s acceptance of Svyatoslav’s patronage stands beside that rebuke as a study in how the holy man dealt with princely power (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; on this whole theme see Care for the Poor and Prisoners). The land-grant and the building money were accepted; the prince’s politics were not therefore endorsed. That the monastery could receive a prince’s bounty and still speak truth to him is part of the witness the Caves tradition prized.

The Foundation of the Dormition Cathedral

The crowning building project of Theodosius’s abbacy was the great stone church of the Dormition (the Uspensky sobor), the Velikaya tserkov, “the Great Church,” which would become the architectural and spiritual center of the monastery and the model for cathedral building across Rus. Its foundation was laid in Theodosius’s last years; its completion came after his death.

Here the securely datable framework can be stated, and it must be kept distinct from the legendary embellishment. The historical core is this: the foundation of the stone Dormition cathedral was laid toward the end of Theodosius’s life, conventionally about 1073, under the patronage of Prince Svyatoslav, who is remembered as contributing to it and as granting or confirming the site; Theodosius died in 1074, before the church was built up; and the cathedral was raised in the years following his death, the main structure being completed and the building advanced in the later 1070s (Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989; The Russian Primary Chronicle, building entries and s.a. 1074, Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). [Disputed: the sources and the scholarship give a range of dates for the cathedral's history rather than a single agreed set — the foundation is usually placed c. 1073, the completion of the main fabric c. 1075–1078, and the consecration of the finished and decorated church in 1089 under Hegumen John (Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; Heppell 1989); the *Paterik*'s own internal chronology of the building is schematic and partly legendary, so individual years within this span are reported variously]. What is firm is the sequence and the persons: founded under Theodosius and Svyatoslav about 1073, built after Theodosius’s death of 1074, consecrated in 1089. The great church was destroyed in the twentieth century and rebuilt; its medieval form is known from descriptions and excavation.

The Paterik’s Account of the Founding — Reported as Legend

The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery surrounds the founding of the Dormition cathedral with a cycle of marvels that became among the most beloved stories of Russian piety. These are presented here as the Paterik‘s own tradition — what the monastery told about the origin of its Great Church — and not as historically established fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The Paterik is a thirteenth-century compilation drawing on earlier letters of Bishop Simon and the monk Polycarp, written generations after the events; its founding-tales are hagiographic legend in the precise sense, and the modern reader should receive them as the monastery’s sacred memory of its origins rather than as a building record (Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989, introduction).

According to the Paterik, the building of the Great Church was directed from heaven at every stage. In one tale, the Mother of God herself appears in Constantinople to a company of Greek master-builders, gives them gold, and sends them to Kiev to raise a church in her honor, foretelling her own role as its patron and even that she will come to dwell in it (Heppell 1989). The site of the church, the Paterik relates, was marked out not by surveyors but by divine signs — by a fall of dew and dryness on the chosen ground in answer to Theodosius’s and Anthony’s prayer, and by a measuring of the foundations with a golden belt that the Varangian Shimon (Simon) had brought, the belt itself the subject of its own miraculous history (Heppell 1989). A further cycle, attached to the church’s decoration, tells of Greek icon-painters (the mosaicists and iconographers) similarly summoned and miraculously brought to Kiev to adorn the completed church, and of relics — relics of holy martyrs — deposited in its foundations and beneath its altar (Heppell 1989).

These accounts are theologically rich and historically legendary, and the two judgments must be held together. They are legendary in that they cannot be taken as a factual record: the divine apparitions, the golden belt as a literal measuring-cord, the supernatural transport of builders and painters, are the stuff of devotional narrative, composed long after to express the conviction that the Great Church was the special foundation of the Mother of God (Heppell 1989; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind I, 1946). They are theologically rich in that they encode a genuine and historically important claim: that the Caves monastery understood its cathedral, and itself, to stand under the direct patronage of the Theotokos, and that its art and architecture were felt to be a gift transmitted from Byzantium — the Greek builders and painters dramatizing the real dependence of Kievan church-building on Constantinopolitan models (Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, 1996). The historian distinguishes the marvels from the masonry; the Paterik fuses them, and in doing so tells us what the building meant to those who prayed in it. The proper Orthodox reading neither credits the legends as chronicle nor dismisses the devotion they carry, but receives them as the monastery’s own witness to the sanctity of its founding (METHODOLOGY §3.5; on the Paterik as a source, see The Paterik Portrait).

What Theodosius Left

When Theodosius died in 1074 the monastery he left was no longer a cave. It was a walled cenobium on the hill above the Dnieper, with a wooden Dormition church, a refectory, multiplied cells, an ordered hierarchy of offices under the Studite rule, the patronage of the prince of Kiev, and the foundations of a great stone cathedral newly laid in the earth (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; The Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1074, Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The completion of the Great Church and its consecration in 1089 fell to his successors, but the institution that would raise it was his work. The building of the monastery, in the literal sense of timber and stone, was inseparable from the building of it in the institutional sense — the creation of the model coenobium that would be the fountainhead of Russian monastic life (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind I, 1946; and see Russian Monasticism and the wider lineage represented by St. Sergius of Radonezh and the Kievan princely foundations of St. Vladimir of Kiev).

References

Nestor. The Life of Our Holy Father Theodosius, Abbot of the Caves. Trans. in G. P. Fedotov, ed., A Treasury of Russian Spirituality. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1948. (The move above ground, the building of church and cells, the introduction of the Studite rule and its offices, Theodosius’s manual labor at the work, and his dealings with Prince Svyatoslav.)
The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. Trans. Muriel Heppell. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. (The legendary cycle of the building of the Great Church: the Greek master-builders summoned by the Mother of God, the golden belt of Shimon and the measuring of the foundations, the dew-and-dryness marking of the site, the Greek icon-painters, and the relics deposited in the church; Svyatoslav’s grant and patronage; the building chronology. Introduction on the Paterik’s thirteenth-century composition from the letters of Simon and Polycarp.)
The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. (The notice s.a. 1051 on the caves, the church and cells, and the move above ground; the building entries on the Dormition cathedral; the death of Theodosius s.a. 1074; the consecration of the Great Church in 1089.)
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The Caves monastery as the fountainhead of the Russian monastic ideal; the combination of cave-asceticism with Studite cenobitic order; assessment of the Paterik’s legends.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London and New York: Longman, 1996. (Princely patronage of the monastery; the dependence of Kievan church-building and church-decoration on Byzantine models, the historical reality behind the legend of the Greek builders and painters.)