Venerable Paisius Velichkovsky

Paisius Velichkovsky was born in Poltava in 1722 and studied at the Kyiv Academy, but left it for the monastic life. He lived on Mount Athos from 1746 to 1763, then moved to Moldavia, where he led growing communities at Dragomirna, Secu and, from 1779, Neamt, which numbered hundreds of monks of several nationalities.

He collected and corrected old manuscripts of the Church Fathers, and he and his helpers translated them from Greek into Church Slavonic and Romanian. His Slavonic version of the Philokalia was printed in St Petersburg in 1793. Through it and through his disciples, he is counted among the sources of the Russian tradition of spiritual elders. He died at Neamt on 15 November 1794.