Saint Anthony of Kyiv

Saint Anthony of Kyiv, also known as Anthony of the Caves or Anthony Pechersky, was an eleventh-century monk venerated as the founder of organized monastic life in Kievan Rus'. Hagiographical tradition, preserved chiefly in the Kiev Caves Paterikon and related later compilations, identifies his birthplace as the town of Liubech in the Chernihiv region. Contemporary chronicles do not record the year of his birth. Later writers, working from a reported age of about ninety at the time of his death in 1073, have often assigned the year 983. His name in the world is not given in the earliest surviving accounts.

According to the same tradition, Anthony left Rus' as a young man and made his way to Mount Athos, the principal center of Byzantine monasticism. There he received the monastic tonsure; Athonite memory later associated him with the monastery of Esphigmenou. After a period of ascetic formation, his abbot directed him to return to his native land in order to plant the monastic life among the East Slavs, who had been officially converted to Christianity only in the late tenth century. Anthony established himself near Kiev, occupying a cave on the wooded hill of Berestovo that had previously been used by the priest Hilarion, who became metropolitan of Kiev around 1051. The Primary Chronicle links the origin of the Caves community with this era, in the reign of Yaroslav the Wise.

Disciples gathered around the hermit. When some twelve brethren had joined him, they enlarged the underground complex, fashioning cells and a church within the caves, and so formed a lavra. Anthony, whose vocation remained eremitical rather than cenobitic, declined to serve as abbot. He appointed the monk Barlaam, son of a Kievan boyar, as the first igumen, and withdrew to a newly dug cave in order to live in stricter solitude. Barlaam was subsequently succeeded by Theodosius of the Caves, who organized the brotherhood as a coenobium and introduced the liturgical and disciplinary rule of the Studios Monastery in Constantinople. The princes of Kiev, notably Iziaslav I, granted the community the hill on which it stood. From these beginnings grew the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, which became the foremost monastery of Rus' and a school of chroniclers, hagiographers, and icon painters. Anthony’s relations with the princely court were not always untroubled. Hagiographical narratives recount that he incurred the displeasure of Iziaslav and withdrew for a time to Chernihiv, where caves on the Boldin Hills are associated with his sojourn, before returning to the Kievan community.

Anthony is said to have died in 1073, in the same year that the foundation of the great stone church of the Dormition of the Lavra was laid, and to have been buried in the cave that had been his cell. His relics remain in the Near Caves of the monastery. He was honored as a saint from an early date. The Eastern Orthodox Churches commemorate him on 10 July, together with Theodosius on 2 September, and among the synaxis of the Fathers of the Kiev Caves. He is regarded as the father of monasticism in the East Slavic Orthodox world. Because the original Life of Anthony has not survived as an independent early text, and because the Paterikon was compiled generations after his death, many particulars of his biography belong to monastic tradition rather than to strictly contemporary documentation. Nonetheless, the existence of the cave community in the mid-eleventh century and Anthony’s role as its spiritual founder are consistent with the witness of the Primary Chronicle and with the later preeminence of the Lavra.