Mark of the Pskov Caves

The Venerable Mark of the Pskov Caves is counted the first hermit of the Pskov Caves and the fourth "Mark" among the great hermits, after three earlier ones whom the Church honours. Of his life almost nothing is known: the chronicle says that they could not find out what sort of elder he was, of what family, how he came to that place, how long he lived there and how he died. He could have been a local man, who knew the secrets of the cave, or have come from afar by God's arrangement.

The place

The caves lie in the valley of the little river Kamenets, in a region long wrapped in a mysterious air. Hunters from Izborsk heard church singing coming from the mountain without seeing anyone, and smelled a fragrance like incense. The land passed to the peasant Ivan Dementiev, who, felling the forest on the Holy Mountain, found in 1392 the mouth of a cave marked "built by God", laid bare by a falling tree. How long those who had left the world laboured there and what they were called, God alone knows; tradition has kept only the name of Mark.

The hermit

The first monasteries of Pskov had been plundered by the Livonian knights, monks were killed or taken captive, and those who could fled to the caves of the Kamenets. Mark and those who were saved in forests and caves thus laid the beginning of the monastery of the Caves, which for a long time stayed almost hidden. Hunters told that they sometimes saw him praying on the hillside beside three stones, two of which still lie under the oaks in the monastery's upper garden. He was buried in an oak log hollowed like a boat, which, according to tradition, served him both as bed and as coffin. The Venerable Jonah, the first founder, knew where his relics rest, and a later founder wrote the name of "the first monk of the Caves, Mark" in the synodikon.

Veneration

In 1523 the abbot Dorotheus, wishing to make a larger tomb, found the coffin fallen apart but the bones, the vestments and the head incorrupt. Later the Venerable Martyr Cornelius, having no written testimony about Mark, ordered his name erased from the synodikon. He was struck with blindness and weakness of hands and feet, asked to be taken to the tomb, begged forgiveness, left healthy and ordered the name restored. In 1642, by the charter of Bishop Gennady of Pskov, the relics of Mark, of the Venerable Jonah and of Mother Vassa were placed in new tombs at the entrance of the cave, and in 1773 they were vested anew; Mark's relics now lie in a case-⁠coffin in the second section of the crypt.

Formerly his memory was kept only on 29 March (11 April); since 1987 it is also kept on the day of the Synaxis of the Saints of Pskov, on the third Sunday after Pentecost, and lately also on the day of the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Pskov Caves, on the fourth Sunday.