The life of St Dosithea, recluse of the Kiev Caves
Disguised this way, she spent three years struggling in ascetic life at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, undetected even when relatives once visited the monastery, until she slipped away before they could recognize her and made her way instead to Kiev. On Kitaevo hill outside the city she carved out a cave of her own and settled into a life of nearly complete seclusion, speaking to the many visitors who sought her out only through a small window that kept her face hidden from view, a discipline that helped preserve, unbroken for decades, the secret of who she truly was. Among those she counseled was a young pilgrim named Prokhor Moshnin, whom she directed to seek out the monastery at Sarov rather than settle where he had originally intended, guidance that set him on the path he followed for the rest of his life as Seraphim of Sarov. She reposed in 1776, having left instructions that her body be buried without being disturbed, and it was only in preparing her for burial that those around her discovered Dositheus had been a woman all along. The Holy Synod formally numbered her among the saints in 1993, and she is remembered as one of the figures who helped keep alive, in Russia's own monastic life, the older hesychast tradition of unceasing prayer.
