Gerontius the Canonarch

Venerable Gerontius the Canonarch was a child monk and canonarch of the Kyiv Caves monastery, probably in the fourteenth century, who died at eleven or twelve years of age. He is venerated by the Russian Church among the venerable and remembered on 1 April and on 28 August on the old calendar, in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves. A Ukrainian source remembers him on 14 April (1 April on the old calendar).

The child canonarch

Gerontius received monastic tonsure already in childhood and was canonarch of the Dormition cathedral of the monastery, that is the one who gives out the chants to the choir. A Ukrainian source says that in prayer and fasting he followed the experienced monks of the Caves and that, with Venerable Leontius, he was canonarch in the great church of the Caves. Leontius is remembered on 18 June (1 July). He died very young, at eleven or twelve years. According to anthropological studies he was about 127 cm tall. His relics are in the Far Caves of the Caves Lavra, in one shrine with those of Leontius the Canonarch, by one source, and by the Ukrainian source beside the relics of Venerable Longinus and not far from the underground church of the Nativity. Paul of Aleppo, who visited the monastery in 1653, wrote that he saw here the bodies of two boys, whose heads were yellow and still exuded myrrh.

Veneration

The local veneration of Gerontius began at the end of the seventeenth century, when the archimandrite of the Caves, Varlaam Yasinsky (later metropolitan of Kyiv), established the feast of the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves. In the service composed then, the third troparion of the fifth ode of the canon glorifies the two venerable canonarchs. Veneration throughout the Church began after the Holy Synod permitted, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the names of a number of Kyivan saints to be entered in the common menologia. An iconographic manual of the end of the eighteenth century shows that he is to be painted as a youth, with a black cowl on his shoulders, in monastic robe. On an icon of the middle of the nineteenth century, placed above the shrine, Gerontius is shown in sticharion, with an open service book in his hands.