Agathon the Wonderworker

Venerable Agathon the Wonderworker (Agathon of the Kiev Caves) was a monk of the Kiev Caves Monastery in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He is commemorated on 20 February in leap years (4 March), or on 20 February in ordinary years (5 March), and on 28 August (10 September), in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves of Kiev.

His life is known from the inscription on the plate that closed the entrance of the cave. It says that the venerable one had the gift of prophecy and of healing and healed the sick by laying his hands on them. A manuscript of Archbishop Modest (Strilbytsky) says that the Lord, for his life of fasting, gave him the gift of miracles, and that he knew the future and the time of his death, and the place where he would be laid. According to anthropological research, he died at 30 to 40 years of age and stood about 156 centimetres tall. The approximate birth year 1250 on the record is only an estimate.

The local canonization took place in 1643, when Metropolitan Peter Mohyla established the celebration of the Synaxes of the venerable fathers of the Far and Near Caves, and veneration throughout the Church was set by decrees of the Holy Synod of 1762, 1775 and 1784, by which the names of a number of Kiev saints were permitted in the general church calendars. His relics rest in the Far Caves of the Lavra, between the relics of Venerable Silouan and Zacharias. His name is mentioned in the service of the venerable fathers of the Far Caves, in the second troparion of the third ode of the canon, where he is called the beauty of fasters, an unerring prophet and healer of the sick.