The Life
The monastery he founded became the cradle of Russian Christianity. Anthony was born about 983 in the town of Liubech, north of Kiev in what is now Ukraine. His baptismal name was Antipas. He grew up in the generation that witnessed the Baptism of Rus by Saint Vladimir in 988. Christianity was new in his land, and there were not yet any indigenous Russian monasteries. As a young man Antipas decided that he wanted to live the monastic life. He left Liubech and traveled south to Mount Athos in the Byzantine Empire, the great peninsula in northern Greece that had become the principal monastic center of the Eastern Christian world. He was received at Esphigmenou Monastery, was tonsured a monk with the new name Anthony, and lived there for some years in obedience and ascetical practice. Eventually his abbot received a divine direction: Anthony was to return to his Russian homeland and plant the Athonite monastic tradition there. Anthony obeyed. He returned to Kiev about 1015. He found existing monasteries (founded by Greek hierarchs from Constantinople) but they did not satisfy him; they were too lax. He withdrew to a small cave outside Kiev that had been dug by a priest named Hilarion (who would later become Metropolitan of Kiev). There he began his ascetical life. Disciples came. The cave was expanded. By the 1050s a monastic community had developed, called the Kiev Caves Lavra (Pechersk Lavra). Anthony\'s most important disciple was Saint Theodosius, who became the second abbot and introduced the Studite Rule. Anthony reposed in 1073 at age ninety. He had asked that his relics be hidden; they have never been found. The Kiev Caves Lavra he founded became the cradle of Russian Christianity and continues today as one of the most important monasteries of the Orthodox world.
When Antipas was a young man, perhaps twenty years old, he made a difficult decision. The Christianity of his homeland was new, only a generation old. There were churches in the cities, with Greek bishops who had been sent from Constantinople, but there were no Russian monasteries. There was nowhere in Rus to learn what serious monastic life looked like. So Antipas decided to go where the monastic life was already established. He set out from Liubech traveling south. He crossed the lands of the Black Sea, passed through the Byzantine territories of the Balkans, and eventually reached the great monastic peninsula called the Holy Mountain -- Mount Athos -- in northern Greece. The peninsula was already, by the early eleventh century, covered with monasteries and individual hermits. The principal foundations of the Holy Mountain had been established in the ninth and tenth centuries; the Great Lavra of Saint Athanasius had been founded in 963; smaller foundations and individual hermitages were scattered through the forests and along the cliffs. Antipas presented himself at one of the monasteries -- the tradition identifies it as Esphigmenou -- and asked to be received. The abbot received him. He was tonsured a monk with the new name Anthony, in honor of Saint Anthony the Great, the founder of all Christian monasticism. He stayed there several years. He learned the rhythms of the canonical hours, the practice of unceasing prayer, the integration of manual labor with contemplation, the patterns of fasting, the discipline of obedience to a spiritual father. He absorbed everything. He had no idea, in those years, that he was being prepared for a mission that would shape an entire civilization.
After several years at Esphigmenou, Anthony had received the foundational formation he had come to Athos for. He could have stayed. The Russian lands were far away and uncivilized; the Byzantine Empire was wealthy and refined; Athos was the most beautiful and most prayerful place he had ever known. Many Russian monks went to Athos and stayed for life. But Anthony\'s abbot received guidance: Anthony was not to stay. He was to return home. The abbot called Anthony to him and said: Anthony, the Lord wishes you to return to your own Russian land and to be an example for others. Many monks will come to you there. Take with you the blessing of the Holy Mountain. Anthony obeyed. He left Athos. He retraced his journey across the Balkans and the Black Sea and arrived back in Rus about 1015. But the political situation in Kiev was disastrous: Saint Vladimir had just died, and his son Sviatopolk had seized the throne and was murdering his brothers (Saints Boris and Gleb were martyred at this period). Anthony saw the chaos, decided he could not begin his mission under such conditions, and returned to Athos. He stayed several more years. Then his abbot, in the time of stability after Yaroslav the Wise had restored order, sent him back a second time, with a renewed prophecy: many monks would gather around him this time. The second mission would be the one that worked. Anthony arrived back in Kiev about 1028 (the dates vary somewhat among the sources) and would not leave Russian soil for the remaining forty-five years of his life.
When Anthony returned to Kiev for the second time, around 1028, he visited the existing Greek monasteries in the city. He was not satisfied with any of them. They followed Greek liturgical practice, but their ascetical discipline was loose; the monks lived comfortably; the rigorous Athonite tradition Anthony had learned was nowhere in evidence. Anthony decided that he would not join any of them. He left the city and walked into the wooded hills above Kiev, near a village called Berestovo, on the right bank of the Dnieper River. The hills were forested and quiet, the area resembling somewhat the wooded hills of Mount Athos. There he found something providential: a small cave already dug into the soft limestone of the hillside. The cave had been excavated some time earlier by a priest named Hilarion, a learned Russian who served at the church of the Holy Apostles in Berestovo and who had used the cave for periods of personal prayer and seclusion (this same Hilarion would, in 1051, become Metropolitan of Kiev under Yaroslav the Wise). When Hilarion was elevated to the metropolitan office, the cave was no longer in use. Anthony found it. He prayed and asked the Lord to bless the place. He moved in. He began the same severe ascetical practice he had learned on Athos: fasting (dry bread every other day, sometimes nothing for a week), prayer (the canonical hours, the unceasing inner prayer of the heart), manual labor, sustained vigil. He had no plan for what came next. He was simply doing what he had learned to do. He waited to see what the Lord would do.
Word spread that there was an Athonite-trained ascetic living in a cave outside Kiev. People came. Some came simply to receive a blessing. Some came for spiritual counsel. Some came hoping to live as monks under his direction. Anthony received them all but did not actively recruit. He let the work be the Lord\'s. The first disciple of significance was a priest named Nikon, who had himself received some monastic formation and who could perform the priestly functions (the Eucharist, the tonsure of new monks) that Anthony, who was not ordained a priest, could not. Nikon became Anthony\'s collaborator. As more disciples arrived they were tonsured by Nikon under Anthony\'s spiritual direction. The community grew. The disciples dug more caves into the hillside, expanding the cave system. They dug a small church into the limestone, with a nave, a sanctuary, and an altar. They dug individual cells for each monk. By approximately 1051, when Saint Theodosius arrived (a young man of twenty-three who had walked from Kursk to Kiev seeking the monastic life), the community had reached the threshold of about twelve monks. Anthony and the community recognized that they had become a monastery. Anthony, however, was committed to remaining a hermit. He appointed one of his disciples, Barlaam, as the first abbot of the formal community. He himself withdrew to a separate cave further up the hillside, which became the origin of what would later be called the Far Caves. The community continued to grow. After Barlaam was called away to head another monastery, Theodosius was appointed second abbot. Theodosius brought in the Studite Rule from Constantinople, establishing the cenobitic foundation of the community. By the late 1050s the Kiev Caves Lavra had become the principal monastic foundation of Kievan Rus.
As the community grew through the 1060s, Anthony and Theodosius decided that the underground caves were no longer sufficient. They needed a proper church above ground, a stone church large enough to hold the many monks and the visiting faithful. They began to plan for it. Then something extraordinary happened. The hagiographical tradition records that the Most Holy Theotokos appeared to both Anthony and Theodosius simultaneously while they were praying at the Lavra. They were also, in some inexplicable way, present in the Blachernae Church in Constantinople, the great Marian shrine of the Byzantine capital. The Theotokos spoke to them about the church they wished to build. She gave them gold for the construction. She told them that she would send architects from Constantinople. Some time later, four Greek architects arrived at the Lavra, having been commissioned in Constantinople by an unknown lady who had given them gold and detailed instructions. When the architects described the lady to the monks, Anthony and Theodosius understood: it had been the Theotokos herself. The architects designed and built the large stone Church of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos at the Lavra, the cathedral church of the new monastery and the principal monumental building of Kievan Rus. During the same vision the Theotokos also foretold Anthony\'s imminent repose. He died on July 10, 1073, age ninety, having blessed the foundation of the new church but not living to see it completed. Theodosius died the following year, 1074, with the church still under construction. The cathedral was completed in 1089, sixteen years after Anthony\'s death. It became the center of the Russian Church.
Saint Anthony\'s achievement was bigger than founding a single monastery. The Baptism of Rus by Saint Vladimir in 988 had brought Christianity to the Russian people at the level of public liturgical celebration and ecclesiastical hierarchy. But baptism is the beginning of Christian life, not its completion. For the Russian Church to become more than a Christian state, it needed indigenous depth: native Russian saints, native Russian theological writers, native Russian monastic communities where the patristic tradition could be transmitted from generation to generation in the Russian language and Russian context. Saint Anthony provided this. He went to Athos, the most authentic monastic center of his world, and brought back what he had learned. His monastery at the Caves became the schoolhouse of Russian Christianity. From the Lavra emerged the foundational Russian saints (Theodosius, Nestor the Chronicler, Hilarion of Kiev, Cyril of Turov, and many more), the foundational Russian patristic literature (the Kievan Cave Patericon, the Primary Chronicle, the homilies of Hilarion), the foundational Russian liturgical-iconographic tradition. The other monasteries of medieval Rus -- Saint Sergius of Radonezh\'s Trinity-Sergius Lavra, the Solovetsky Monastery, the great hermitages of the Russian North -- would all derive from the Kiev Caves foundation. Saint Anthony was the link that connected Russian Christianity to the broader patristic patrimony. Without him the Russian Church would have remained an isolated daughter of Constantinople rather than a living member of the patristic communion.
One of the most important things about Saint Anthony\'s foundation is that the Most Holy Theotokos personally chose his monastery for her patronage. The vision at Blachernae, the architects she sent, the gold she provided, the dedication of the great cathedral to her Dormition -- all of this embodies the truth that the Mother of God herself adopted the Kiev Caves Lavra as her own foundation. From this beginning the Russian Christian people would develop the deep conviction that the Theotokos was the personal patroness of their land, the heavenly mother of the Russian people, the protector of Russian Christianity through every subsequent crisis. The conviction would be reinforced over the centuries through additional Marian apparitions and miracles in Russian history: the Vladimir Icon\'s deliverance of Moscow from Tamerlane in 1395; the Kazan Icon\'s deliverance of Russia in the Time of Troubles; the Smolensk Icon\'s deliverance during the Napoleonic invasion; the modern witness of countless Marian icons venerated across the Russian world. Russia would come to be called, in Russian theological tradition, "the House of the Most Holy Theotokos." The foundational expression of this Marian patronage was the choice of the Kiev Caves Lavra by the Theotokos in the Blachernae appearance to Saint Anthony and Saint Theodosius. The Russian people understand themselves to be, through Saint Anthony\'s mediation, in a special providential relationship with the Mother of God; the foundation of this understanding is the events of the eleventh century at the Kiev Caves Lavra.
Saint Anthony reposed at the Kiev Caves Lavra on July 10, 1073, in his ninetieth year. The Theotokos had foretold his repose during the Blachernae appearance some time earlier; he had had time to prepare. He gathered the brethren at his cave. He blessed them. He told them that he was going to leave this life. He gave them final spiritual counsel: remain faithful to the Lavra, remain in repentance, remain in obedience to the abbot, and the Lord would protect the community across the centuries. He made one specific request: he asked that his relics be hidden, that nobody attempt to find them, that his body remain forever in the cave where he had labored. The brethren agreed. They buried him in his own cave. They did not mark the spot. Across the subsequent centuries multiple efforts have been made to locate Saint Anthony\'s relics: in the eleventh century the brethren tried but a column of fire and a column of water turned them back; in the modern period various excavations have been attempted. The relics have never been found. They remain hidden somewhere within the Near Caves of the Lavra. Pilgrims continue to come to the cave where Saint Anthony is believed to rest, and many healings and answered prayers are reported there. The Kiev Caves Lavra, in active monastic life from 1051 to the present (with brief disruptions during the Mongol invasions and the Soviet persecutions), continues today as one of the most theologically significant monasteries of the global Orthodox world. Saint Anthony is venerated on July 10 (his repose), September 2 (with Saint Theodosius), and September 28 (the synaxis of all the Kiev Caves Fathers). He is universally received in the Russian Orthodox tradition as the father of all Russian monks.