Venerable Martyr Eustratius the Faster of the Kiev Caves

Venerable Martyr Eustratius came from a wealthy Kievan family; having distributed his inheritance to the poor, he took monastic vows at the Kiev Caves Monastery and practiced strict fasting, earning him the epithet "the Faster." On July 20, 1096, Cuman (Polovtsian) forces under Khan Bonyak raided the Kiev Caves Monastery, pillaging it and capturing about fifty people, including monks and monastery laborers. Eustratius was among the captives taken to Cherson (Korsun) in Crimea and sold into slavery to a Jewish merchant. The merchant tried to force the captives to renounce Christ through starvation; Eustratius, accustomed to abstinence as a strict faster, outlasted the others — tradition holds fourteen days without food or water. On Pascha, in blasphemous mockery of Christ's Passion, the merchant crucified him, and about fifteen days later finished him with a spear thrust. Eustratius's martyrdom caused a scandal: according to sources, the Byzantine authorities executed the local official and the merchant, and Jewish traders were expelled from Cherson with confiscation of their property. The saint's body, cast into the sea, was later recovered and buried in the Near Caves of the Kiev Caves Lavra, where his relics rest to this day. His memory is kept on March 28/April 10, and also in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves and on the 2nd Sunday of Great Lent (Synaxis of All Saints of the Kiev Caves).