Achilas the Deacon

Venerable Achilas the Deacon was a monk and deacon of the Kiev Caves Monastery, in a time placed between the end of the thirteenth century and the fifteenth century (the sources do not agree: one says the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, another the end of the thirteenth to the fifteenth, with a question mark). He is honoured by the Russian Church among the venerable fathers. He is commemorated on 4 January by the old calendar (17 January by the new) and on 28 August (10 September), in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves of the Kiev Caves Lavra.

Only a short life of him is known, based on an inscription copied in the seventeenth century from his gravestone. His troparion and kontakion were copied from it also. According to these sources, Achilas was a deacon of the Dormition cathedral of the monastery. He was distinguished by strict abstinence in food: in a week he ate one prosphora and a few vegetables.

The Teratourgima, written in 1638 by Hieromonk Athanasius Kalnofoysky of the Lavra, numbers him among the venerable fathers of the Far Caves. His local veneration began at the end of the seventeenth century, when Archimandrite Barlaam Yasinsky of the Lavra established the commemoration of the Synaxis of the venerable fathers of the caves of the Lavra. Here the source speaks of the Near Caves, although it counts Achilas among those of the Far Caves; we cannot resolve this discrepancy. 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 whole Church.

On icons the venerable Achilas is shown in diaconal vestments, with a sticharion, an orarion crossed over the shoulders, a kamilavka, wavy hair falling on his shoulders and a short rounded beard, holding an open book. His relics rest in the Far Caves.