Lidiia Lozova, cultural studies scholar, researcher of Orthodoxy, British Academy Research Fellow at the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Exeter, member of the the Sophia Brotherhood
I first learned about the Way of St Anthony, dedicated to the well-known St Anthony of the Kyiv Caves, about a year ago. Ever since, I had wanted to take part in it: my intuition suggested that amid the seemingly irresolvable crisis in Ukrainian Orthodoxy and the despair brought by an endless war, this might be one of the freshest and most profound initiatives in Ukraine’s contemporary spiritual life. So, after returning to Ukraine following several years abroad, I signed up for the pilgrimage at the first opportunity – although, given the sharp escalation of Russian attacks on Kyiv, the idea did not seem entirely safe.
So what is the Way of St Anthony? It is a pilgrimage conceived by two laypeople – entrepreneur Andrii Melnyk and theologian Oleksandr Filonenko – together with Orthodox Church of Ukraine priest Fr Georgii Kovalenko, all of whom are searching for meaning amid contemporary challenges, both as Orthodox Christians and as citizens of a country experiencing a multilayered crisis. Its inspiration was not the traditional Orthodox procession to a shrine, but Andrii Melnyk’s experience of walking the Way of St James, combined with a shared desire to rediscover a connection with their own spiritual tradition in the company of fellow travellers. Unlike the Way of St James, the Way of St Anthony today is not a walking pilgrimage but is undertaken mainly by car, since the distances are too great, while a bus is easier for Russian drones to target. Setting out from Kyiv, pilgrims travel in several cars to places associated with the saint’s life in Ukraine: Liubech on the Belarusian border, for which special permission to enter had to be obtained from the Border Guard Service; Chernihiv; and then back to Kyiv. In September 2026, around twenty-five people from different walks of life took part in the Way of St Anthony – from an entrepreneur and a civil servant to a psychotherapist and an icon painter. Those who had never attended a church service travelled alongside people with considerable church experience. Our guides were the organizers of the Way, who tried to make the journey meaningful for everyone, as well as local experts and museum staff.
Who, then, was St Anthony, and how is the pilgrimage route connected with him? According to the hagiographic tradition that took shape in the seventeenth century, Anthony – Antipas in secular life – was born around 983 in Liubech, at that time an important trading centre on the route “from the Varangians to the Greeks” and, by first chronicle mention, the oldest city in present-day Ukraine after Kyiv. Local tradition associates him with a prayer cave on the outskirts of the town, said to have been dug while he was still young. Later he travelled to Mount Athos, apparently along the Dnipro and the same route “from the Varangians to the Greeks,” where he became a monk. From there, on the instruction of his spiritual elder, Anthony returned to Kyiv in order to bring to the Kyiv hills the Athonite tradition of strict monastic solitude. Because of a conflict with the prince of Kyiv, Anthony, already advanced in age, found himself in Chernihiv – then the capital of the largest principality after Kyiv – where he also dug a cave. He later returned to the Kyiv Caves Monastery, where he ended his life and was buried in the Near Caves. The story of Anthony of the Caves follows a recognizable pattern from the Life of Anthony the Great: solitude in a cave, spiritual struggle, the gradual gathering of disciples who come to the recluse of their own accord, ever deeper withdrawal, and avoidance of the role of leader of the community. Yet while the Life of Anthony the Great describes a hermit among scattered cells, in Kyiv a monastery with a rule and an abbot arose around Anthony. Anthony himself, however, refused to head it, appointing first Varlaam and then Theodosius as abbot. A later tradition says that Anthony wished his body never to be found, and that attempts to excavate his grave were prevented by fire and water. Indeed, no one has ever seen his relics: the shrine in the Near Caves merely indicates the approximate place of burial.
Why, then, should we in Ukraine today follow the route of St Anthony – a man who, evidently, spent his whole life fleeing from people? Several reasons may be singled out, in which the existential is intertwined with the spiritual and the cultural.
The basic need for silence. In Kyiv, the war is experienced as a state of constant alarm. The sound of the air-raid siren eats into the air day and night and continues in the body as a feeling of unease even after the sound has faded. Periodic explosions, destruction, and news of deaths make anxiety a constant background – even for those following events from relatively safe places. In this situation, quiet, peaceful, deep prayer often feels almost physically impossible, yet at the same time existentially necessary for an encounter with God and with oneself. We entered Liubech in a car equipped with a device that tracked the movement of missiles in the sky. The cave-chapel of St Anthony, which we entered immediately upon arrival and which is now cared for by a community of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and where we read and sang the first part of the Akathist to Anthony associated with Liubech, felt like a longed-for shelter in both the literal and figurative sense. The same was true of St Anthony’s cave in Chernihiv, into which we descended after a museum staff member had spoken about the features of hesychast practice to the accompaniment of an air-raid siren.
The need for support beyond the human. During the war, it is especially difficult to expect support and reassurance from family and loved ones because of the general exhaustion within society, while people outside the country – even friends and partners abroad – mostly live entirely different lives and are unable to understand either the context, the needs of people in Ukraine, or their own role in what is happening. At such times, the need for God becomes stronger, because one acutely realizes that hope in “the sons of men” does not sustain us. Anthony’s radical flight from people helps in the search for a direct encounter with God because it bears experiential witness that such an encounter is possible at all. This was especially palpable in the Anthony Caves in Chernihiv, where, after reading and singing together the section of the Akathist dealing with Anthony’s Chernihiv period, we spent ten minutes in absolute silence twelve metres underground.
The need for meaning. When a crisis of meaning – in one’s personal, social, or ecclesial life – becomes so profound that it cannot be resolved through discussion, analysis, models, strategy, and so on, the radical call of Psalm 46:10 becomes relevant: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Anthony was someone who continually sought meaning in God through a radical renunciation of familiar “positive” strategies. By setting out on pilgrimage under the circumstances in which we live in Ukraine today, participants to some extent give up what they themselves know in order to open themselves, in hope, to what they cannot comprehend.
The need for a connection with one’s own spiritual history. Paradoxically, through Anthony, who spent his entire life fleeing from people, the rich culture of Kyiv Christianity eventually flourished. The Way of Anthony was also conceived as a pilgrimage to one’s own cultural and historical sources. It reveals not only the richness of the medieval Rus’ period, but also the tradition of the Kyiv theological school of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, distorted by Russian historiography and mistakenly reduced by Georges Florovsky in the twentieth century to an agent of Orthodoxy’s “Western Captivity.”
For it was precisely the Orthodox intellectuals of the Kyiv circle led by St Petro Mohyla who rediscovered St Anthony for their contemporaries – and, ultimately, for us. In 1643, when the Metropolis of Kyiv was under Constantinople, a service to the saints of the Caves was composed, at Mohyla’s commission, by Meletios Syrigos, a Greek theologian and envoy of the Patriarch of Constantinople. This became, in effect, an act of their canonization. The groundwork for this had been laid in advance: during the previous decade, the Mohyla circle had published lives of the saints of the Caves and a collection of monastic miracles in order to demonstrate, in the interconfessional polemics of the time with Catholics, Uniates, and Protestants, that Kyiv Orthodoxy possessed its own ancient history. Significantly, the argument in this polemic was precisely holiness rather than dogma: the Life of Anthony functioned not as an illustration of doctrine but rather as a way of expressing that doctrine.
Petro Mohyla’s work did not end with his death: it was taken up by the next generation of Mohyla’s followers in Chernihiv around Archbishop Lazar Baranovych of Chernihiv. They were already active in the Hetmanate – the Cossack state whose Church originally belonged to and retained an umbilical connection with the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Baranovych’s circle included Ioanykii Galiatovsky, a former rector of the Kyiv Collegium; St Dymytrii Tuptalo of Kyiv, better known in world Orthodoxy as “Dimitry of Rostov” because near the end of his life, despite illness and reluctance, he was sent north by Peter I; and later St John Maksymovych of Nizhyn, founder of the Chernihiv Collegium – better known as “John of Tobolsk,” since the same Peter sent him to the Tobolsk see – after whom, two centuries later, his relative from Ukraine’s Slobozhanshchyna region, St John of Shanghai, was named.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these people did not merely rebuild the ancient churches that we were able to see during the pilgrimage after their long decline – for example, the Transfiguration Cathedral, a little-known contemporary of St Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv – they wrote their history. Thanks to them, the antiquities of Chernihiv were for the first time woven into a narrative in which Anthony was no longer merely an episode in the Kyiv Caves Paterikon, but the founder of a tradition in which Chernihiv became the second pole of a single spiritual space. In Anthony’s cave itself, we read aloud a chapter from The Dew-Watered Fleece – a book of miracles of the Icon of the Mother of God of Illinska, written by Dymytrii Tuptalo in 1683 at the Illinska Monastery above the cave. Likewise, in Liubech we visited not only the Prince’s Hill associated with the age of St Anthony, but also learned about the later tradition. For example, we visited the site of the Monastery of St Anthony, where in 1739 the future St Paisius Velichkovsky entered as a novice.
Russian imperial historiography, which for a long time dominated even beyond Russia itself, described this entire history not as an independent tradition originating in Kyiv, but simply as an early chapter of Russian church history, while much else was simply silenced – to such an extent that many of these facts are discoveries even for Ukrainians themselves today.
Anthony’s Way to Liubech and Chernihiv is important not only as an introduction to history for pilgrims, but also as a means of restoring meaning to these cities for those who live there, while at the same time supporting their economy and cultural life. If pilgrimages to today’s neglected Liubech – a small, quiet, picturesque town above the Dnipro, with magnificent views stretching to the horizon across the Dnipro floodplain – become regular and longer in duration, this could revive the town for the local community, which, incidentally, experienced Russian occupation in March 2022.
Returning from Chernihiv to Kyiv in the evening, on a day when several air-raid alerts had sounded and UAVs had struck buildings in the city, we concluded the pilgrimage at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. Our visit began not with antiquity, but with an inspection – together with the director of the National Preserve – of the damage to the Dormition Cathedral, which had miraculously survived a strike by two Russian drones. In the Near Caves, we heard a historically informed account of the site with an emphasis on its Ukrainian identity and, together with two monks of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine monastery, sang the final section of the Akathist to St Anthony.
Finally, in a building of the Preserve where Mohyla once opened his Lavra School, which later grew into the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, we had an opportunity to exchange impressions of what we had seen and experienced. I think this is what genuine spiritual resistance to war looks like: when things are especially difficult, to go deeper, to pray, to be alone – and to walk together; to open oneself to the unexpected and to one’s own tradition; to communicate and to hope that the deepest depths can reveal treasures and help create human solidarity and Ukrainian spiritual culture even in “hopeless” times.
