Zeno the Faster

Venerable Zeno the Faster (also called Zeno the Laborious, fourteenth century) was a schemamonk of the Kyiv Caves Monastery, venerated as a venerable saint in the Russian Church. He is commemorated on 30 January (Old Style, that is 12 February) and on 28 August (10 September according to the Russian source, New Style), in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves. The Ukrainian source says he lived in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

What is known

His life is not known. The brief account of the lives of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves (second half of the seventeenth century) says that "Zeno the faster and labourer pleased God by many monastic labours". The "Teratourgima", written by Hieromonk Athanasius Kalnofoisky, mentions the incorrupt relics of the saint in the caves of the Lavra: "The blessed monk Zeno lies in a whole body". On the map of the Far Caves of 1661 "Zeno" is marked, in 1703 "Zeno the Laborious", later "Saint Zenobius", and in 1795 "venerable Zeno the faster".

Veneration

Local veneration began at the end of the seventeenth century, when Archimandrite Barlaam (Yasinsky) established the celebration of the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves. In the service composed then, Zeno is praised in the third troparion of the third ode of the canon. He also has a separate troparion and kontakion. Veneration in the whole Church began after the permission of the Holy Synod in the second half of the eighteenth century to include the names of a number of Kyivan saints in the general menologia.

Relics and depiction

His incorrupt relics are kept in the Far Caves, near the relics of Deacon Martyrius and the underground church of Saint Theodosius. Anthropological studies show that he died at twenty to twenty-⁠five and was 167 to 170 cm tall. An icon painters' manual of the end of the eighteenth century directs how he is to be painted. His only individual icon, beside the shrine, was painted in the 1840s by Hieromonk Irinarch with pupils, in the Lavra workshop: Zeno sits reading by the light of a candle, an old man with a grey beard, called in the inscription "the faster".