Located about 1 km from the Abbey of Tihany, the site of the caves cut into the basalt tufa was called Oroszkő (‘Russian Stone’) in the Middle Ages. Only from the beginning of the 13th century onwards do written sources directly mention the monks of the Church of St Nicholas of Oroszkő. It is an expressive place-name: ‘Russian’ refers to the origin of the first hermits, while the word ‘Stone’ is already mentioned in the abbey's founding charter of 1055 (in the Latin form ‘Petra’). King Andrew I, who was buried in the abbey's crypt, was baptized according to the Eastern rite, was himself brought up in Kiev and his wife came from there as well. So it is easy to understand why monks from the Kievan Rus (in the parlance of the time, ‘Russian’) were the first inhabitants of the Eastern rite (Basilian) cave monastery. The hermit colony presumably functioned until the 14th century, although in time it was transformed from a Basilian monastery into a priory of the Benedictine abbey.