Paul the Father

Venerable Paul of Patras, called Paul the Father, was hegumen of a seaside lavra at Raithu, belonging to the monastery of Sinai. He was slain by Ethiopian Saracens together with thirty-⁠two other fathers. He is commemorated on 14 January. His veneration is recent and local, at Patras in Greece.

According to the Greek source, he lived at the end of the third century, in the time of emperors named Ulentian and Valens, which does not fit the century, for Valens belongs to the fourth. His martyr's death is mentioned in the Holy Synaxarion, in a description by the Egyptian monk Ammonius.

Although the venerable martyr Paul of Patras was until then unknown, in 1947 the protosyncellus and archimandrite Eustathios Eustathopoulos, later Metropolitan of Gortyna and Megalopolis, saw to the printing of the service of the "Holy Venerable Martyr Fathers slain at Sinai and Raithu", reprinting a text he had found in an old book in 1940 in Kefalonia, where he was serving as a teacher. He also ordered an icon painted with the inscription "Venerable Martyr Paul, the one from Patras of Achaia". The icon was painted in 1952 by the painter Takis Prionas. Then the archimandrite established the feast of the saint in the 1960s, with a festal celebration and Divine Liturgy.