Nicholas Svyatosha

Saint Nicholas Svyatosha was prince of Lutsk and then a monk of the Kyiv Caves Lavra, the first Russian prince to take the monastic habit. Born about 1080 as Svyatoslav Davidovich, he was the son of Prince David Svyatoslavich of Chernigov and a great-⁠grandson of Yaroslav the Wise. He reposed on 14 October 1143. The Church remembers him on 28 September and 14 October, by the Julian calendar.

The prince

Before becoming a monk he was prince of Lutsk. He married, by some accounts Anna, daughter of Grand Prince Svyatopolk of Kyiv, and had children. One of his daughters became the wife of Prince Vsevolod Mstislavich of Novgorod. He was caught up in the princely strife that followed the blinding of Prince Vasilko, and in 1097 he was driven out of Lutsk by David Igorevich and then deprived of his holdings by Rus and Cuman armies. He fled to his father at Chernigov and did not try to win his land back.

The monk

On 17 February 1106, or 1107 according to some sources, he left his family and was tonsured at the Caves Lavra in Kyiv with the name Nicholas, after Saint Nicholas of Myra. For the first three years he worked in the storehouse, splitting wood and carrying water, and then became gatekeeper of the monastery. For these labours the abbot gave him a cell of his own, and before it he planted a garden.

He read much, buying his books with money earned by handwork and gardening; after his death his library stayed with the monastery. At his bidding the letter of Pope Leo against the heresy of Eutyches was translated from Greek. From his own means he built the gate church of the Holy Trinity at the Lavra and the monastery hospital, which he moved to the other side of the enclosure and enlarged, together with the hospital church of Saint Nicholas. The Kyiv district of Svyatoshyn is most probably named after him.

In 1142, at the request of his cousin, Grand Prince Vsevolod Olgovich of Kyiv, he left the monastery for a time to reconcile the princes of Chernigov with their brothers. Tradition says he had the gift of foresight and foretold his own death, and that he healed people by his prayers, among them his own physician Peter, who had followed him into the monastery.

Repose and veneration

He reposed on 14 October 1143. His relics rest in the Near Caves, the Caves of Saint Anthony, of the Kyiv Caves Lavra. His Life, written in the early thirteenth century by Bishop Simon of Vladimir, tells how Grand Prince Izyaslav was healed by Nicholas's hair shirt, and he is honoured as a wonderworker. In 1987 his name was also added to the Synaxis of the Saints of Tula, kept on 22 September by the Julian calendar.