Raphael Mokrensky

Venerable Raphael (Mokrensky) was an archimandrite, rector of the Kharkiv Collegium and, from 1758, abbot of the Sviatohirsk (Holy Mountains) Hermitage, and died in 1765. He is a locally venerated saint of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. On 8 May 2008 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church decided on his local canonization in the Donetsk diocese, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Sviatohirsk. The service of glorification took place on 12 July 2008, at the visit of His Beatitude Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv in the Dormition cathedral of the Lavra. The sources do not agree on the day: a Ukrainian source gives his death on 23 February (10 January) 1765 and the commemoration on 24 September, our calendar gives 11 September.

He was prefect of the Kharkiv Collegium, and in 1753 he was appointed its rector. In June 1758 he became abbot of the Sviatohirsk Hermitage. At that time three kinds of monastic life were developing in the hermitage: communal, skete and hermit. Under him the church of Saints Peter and Paul was built in the monastery. To defend the monastery from Tatar raids, a defensive rampart and a platform in the form of a battery were built behind the skete, at the holy place between the mountains, under the direction of the monk Jacob the gunner.

He died leaving no property. He was buried in the church of Saints Peter and Paul, and later on that place was the brotherhood cemetery of Saints Peter and Paul, destroyed in the Soviet years. After a collapse in the nineteenth century in one of the vaults of the brotherhood cemetery, his relics, as well as the relics of the archimandrites Joel and Thaddeus, were found incorrupt.