Chapter 3 - Vespers at the Kiev Monastery of the Caves

Summary

Chapter 3 follows a clerical chronicler through a typical service at the twelfth-century Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, from the moment he hears the call to prayer to the priest’s final blessing from the ambo. Over the course of the narrative, I name and describe every church book that the chronicler takes up in his hands, and every sort of hymn, prayer, and reading that leaves his lips. In so doing, I attempt to provide a modern academic audience with a glimpse into how the liturgy was lived and experienced, day after day, by the men responsible for writing history in early Rus. I further argue that church books were not simply texts or sources like any other. I suggest, rather, they are the surviving artefacts of a Roman storytelling technology that enveloped its participants in a very special kind of narrative world. In my view, the worship of God, and the ritual retelling of his saving acts, was also a covert form of Byzantine political indoctrination. The liturgical rites inculcated an explicitly eastern Roman social arrangement between ruler and ruled, and they embedded this construct in a series of sacred narratives about the conversion and salvation of the Byzantine Empire.