Jeremiah of the Kiev Caves

Venerable Jeremiah was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra and is called the Clairvoyant. The sources do not agree on the year of his death: some say around 1070, others, among them our record, around 1170. He is honoured by the Russian Church among the venerable fathers. He is commemorated on 28 September, in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves, and on 5 October, by the old calendar (11 and 18 October by the new).

The chronicle, in its account of the monastery, says that he was a contemporary of the Baptism of Rus and was himself baptized then, in 989, in the time of Prince Vladimir. Years later he came to Anthony and Theodosius of the Caves and received monastic tonsure from them. According to a tradition of the monastery, the two great saints of the Caves were present at his reception into the great schema. By age he was the oldest of the first dwellers of the monastery.

His life says that he had the gift of foresight: he could see the future and the moral state of a man's soul, and all that the elder foretold, good or bad, came to pass. Demetrius of Rostov relates that, especially when some brother was thinking of leaving the monastery, Jeremiah, who foresaw it, would come to the brother, rebuke his thought, comfort him and urge him to endure, to wage steadily and unceasingly the struggle with the enemy of good, and not to waver. He strengthened the brother so firmly by his teaching that the brother gave up his intention for ever.

Jeremiah reposed at a great age. His relics lie in the Cave of Saint Anthony, in the Near Caves. An iconographic portrait of him, made by the Lavra engraver Elijah, is printed in the Kiev Caves Paterikon of 1661, and another image is in the Paterikon of 1760.