Cassian the Recluse

Venerable Cassian the Recluse was a monk and faster of the Kyiv Caves monastery, in the twelfth century (by a Ukrainian source, at the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth). He remains known for his long seclusion in a cave. He is remembered on the old calendar on 29 February and on 28 August, in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves, and Archbishop Filaret Gumilevsky set his commemoration separately on 13 March (27 February on the old calendar), the day of Saint John Cassian. A Ukrainian source remembers him on 10 September (28 August on the old calendar).

What is known

Little news of the life of Venerable Cassian has been preserved; the place and date of his birth are not known. The Paterikon of the Caves shows him as a monk who humbled himself before all, was very obedient, hardworking and a faster. By his holy obedience he forced the unclean spirits to confess how many monks there are in the Caves monastery who can cast out demons and how much the demons fear the saints of the Caves. Seclusion in a cave was the crown of his struggles. He fell asleep in seclusion. A manuscript of Modest Strilbytsky says, to the same effect, that he now rejoices in heaven, in unspeakable joy, with the choirs of angels. Sometimes Venerable Cassian is linked, without basis, with the author of the fifteenth-⁠century redaction of the Paterikon.

Relics and image

His relics are in the walled-⁠up cell of the ascetic, in the Theodosian Caves of the Caves Lavra, in the Far Caves, beside the relics of Arsenius the Hardworking, and, by the Ukrainian source, are incorrupt. On the map of the Far Caves of 1638 it is written that there lie the relics of the holy monk and faster Cassian. In 1661 the ascetic is noted as "Cassian the faster" and in 1703 as "Cassian the recluse". In the paintings of the Synaxis of the saints of the Caves in Kyiv he is usually shown in the right group, in the fifth row, in monastic robe, beside Rufus the Recluse, in the row of monks who rest in the Far Caves.