Abraham the Recluse of the Kiev Caves

Venerable Abraham the Recluse of the Kiev Caves was a monk and priest of the Kiev Caves Lavra, between the second third of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth. He is commemorated by the old calendar on 28 September (the Synaxis of the venerable fathers of the Near Caves of Kiev) and on 29 October; the Ukrainian source also adds the second Sunday of Great Lent, in the Synaxis of all the venerable fathers of the Caves and of all the saints.

No information about his life has been preserved, and so scholars date his time to the second third of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the fourteenth, explaining that relatively detailed biographical data survive for the saints of the Caves of the time before the Mongol invasion. It is supposed that he died on 29 October 1360. He laboured in the Near Caves of Saint Anthony. His relics are in the Near Caves of the Caves monastery, between the relics of the Venerable Martyr Anastasius and those of the twelve Greek craftsmen.

Local veneration began under Metropolitan Peter Mohyla, who in 1643 established the celebration of the Synaxis of the venerable fathers of the Near and Far Caves. From the end of the seventeenth century the name of Abraham is mentioned among the saints of the city of Kiev. Veneration throughout the Church began after the permission of the Holy Synod, in the second half of the eighteenth century, for the names of a number of Kiev saints to be entered in the general church calendars.