Job of Manyava

Job of Manyava, known in the world as Ivan Knyahynytskyi, was a Ruthenian Orthodox monk of the early modern period and the founder of the Manyava Skete in the Carpathian Mountains. He was born about the middle of the sixteenth century, traditionally around 1550, in Tysmenytsia in Galicia (Halychyna), a town then situated in the Ruthenian lands of the Kingdom of Poland and today in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine. Some local traditions also connect his origin with the nearby village of Uhornyky. Almost nothing is recorded about his parents or social standing. He grew up in a region whose East Slavic population remained largely Orthodox while living under a Catholic monarchy. In the later sixteenth century he is said to have studied at the Ostroh Academy, the principal Orthodox school of the Polish-Lithuanian world, where the Church Slavonic literary tradition and resistance to Latinizing reform were cultivated. The decades of his youth and early adulthood coincided with the crisis that led to the Union of Brest in 1596, by which a portion of the Kyivan metropolitanate entered communion with Rome.

Desiring a more perfect monastic life than the compromised houses of his homeland could offer, Knyahynytskyi went to Mount Athos. There he was tonsured with the name Job (Iov or Yov in Slavic form) and trained in Athonite practice, including the skete form of small hermit communities living under an elder. His stay on the Holy Mountain placed him among a group of Ruthenian monks who looked to Athos for a model of uncompromising Orthodoxy. After a number of years he returned to Galicia. Back in his native region he was associated with established monasteries, including Univ, before seeking a wilderness site for a new foundation. In the first years of the seventeenth century, commonly dated to about 1606, he established a skete in a secluded Carpathian valley near the village of Manyava, in the Gorgany foothills. The house, known as the Manyava Skete or the Great Skete, was organized on Athonite lines and was intended as a center of strictly Orthodox monastic life at a time when Uniate and Latin institutions were expanding in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

As the first elder of the skete, Job gathered disciples and set the tone of poverty, liturgical regularity, and separation from the Uniate hierarchy. The community became a spiritual refuge for Orthodox clergy and monks who rejected the Union of Brest and is sometimes described in later Ukrainian writing as a Carpathian Athos. Among those formed in this milieu was Theodosius of Manyava, who succeeded Job as head of the hermitage and is likewise venerated as a saint. Contemporary archival documentation of Job’s day-to-day rule is limited; the picture of his personality rests largely on later hagiography, which emphasizes ascetic severity, care for the Orthodox common people of the mountains, and fidelity to Eastern canonical tradition. He died at the skete on 29 December 1621 and was buried in the monastery he had founded.

After his death the Manyava Skete remained an Orthodox monastery through the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century, even as Habsburg Austria acquired Galicia in the partitions of Poland. In 1785 the community was suppressed under the monastic reforms of Emperor Joseph II, and the site fell into ruin, though local memory of Job and Theodosius did not disappear. In the twentieth century, amid the revival of Ukrainian Orthodox life, the skete was restored and the cult of its founders was given more formal expression. Job is venerated as a prepodobnyi, a venerable monastic saint, in the Eastern Orthodox Church, particularly in Ukraine. His feast is observed in connection with 29 December, the traditional date of his repose. He was never a bishop, patriarch, or pope, and there is no evidence that he married or had children; his adult life was that of a celibate monk. Because early sources are scarce, several details of his biography, including the exact year of his birth and some of the stages of his travels, remain approximate and dependent on later tradition rather than on strictly contemporary records.