Thaddeus Kokuilovich

Venerable Thaddeus (Kokuilovich) was an archimandrite and is a saint venerated locally by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He was born about 1694 in the village of Pesochnoye, Kashgor archpriestdom, diocese of Lutsk, and died in 1758. He was canonized locally, in the diocese of Donetsk, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Sviatohirsk.

He was born into the family of Archpriest Lavrenty Stepanovich Kokuilovich. In May 1719 he entered the Dormition Monastery at Yelets. On 13 September 1719 he was tonsured a monk. On 9 December 1719 he was ordained hierodeacon, and soon hieromonk. On 6 October 1721 he was appointed deputy superior of the Saviour Monastery at Novgorod-⁠Seversky. In September 1722 he was appointed prefect and teacher of rhetoric at the Chernihiv collegium. In March 1733 he was raised to the rank of archimandrite. On 24 February 1738 he was appointed abbot of the Forerunner Hermitage at Sudzha. On 24 February 1739 he was appointed abbot of the Sviatohirsk Hermitage, where he put much effort into restoring the monastery after Tatar raids.

By decree of the Holy Synod of 14 January 1741 he was sent to Moscow to take part in correcting the Slavonic translation of the Bible. During the work on the translation he governed the Exaltation of the Cross Monastery in Moscow. In September 1742, after the work ended, he returned to the Sviatohirsk Hermitage. He laboured greatly for the revival of monastic life. In his time hermits appeared in the hermitage, and recluses lived on the monastery's farms. A few kilometres from the monastery, at the Holy Place, he founded a skete of the monastery, in which he began the building of a wooden church, which he did not live to consecrate.

He died in 1758. According to tradition, he was buried in the brotherhood cemetery, beside the church of Saints Peter and Paul. After one of the crypts of the brotherhood cemetery collapsed in the nineteenth century, his relics, like those of the archimandrites Joel and Raphael, were found incorrupt. On 8 May 2008 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church decided on the local canonization of the ascetic in the diocese of Donetsk, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Sviatohirsk. The glorification service took place on the occasion of the visit to the Sviatohirsk Lavra, on 12 July 2008, of the Primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, His Beatitude Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv and all Ukraine, in the Dormition cathedral of the lavra.