Abraham the Laborious

Venerable Abraham the Laborious was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra, in the second half of the thirteenth century or the beginning of the fourteenth (our record gives the years 1300 to 1400; the sources say otherwise). The Russian Church honours him among the venerable fathers. His commemoration is on 21 August and on 28 September (old calendar), in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves (11 October by the new calendar).

No details of his life have been preserved. Filaret (Gumilevsky) considers that Abraham, in the last time of his life, struggled in a cave, and there, after prayer, laboured to prepare everything needed by the brethren of the caves, from which he got the name "laborious". He was buried in the Near Caves (of Saint Anthony) of the Lavra, between the venerable Isaiah and Nifont. Studies show that he died at the age of almost fifty. His relics rest in the Near Caves, beside the relics of Nifont of Novgorod and of Isaiah the wonderworker of the Caves.

His local veneration began under Metropolitan Peter Mohyla, who in 1643 established the feast of the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near and Far Caves. Veneration in the whole Church began after the Holy Synod allowed, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the names of a number of Kievan saints to be entered in the calendars of the Church. He is mentioned in the Lives of the Saints of Saint Demetrius of Rostov.