Venerable Ignatius Archimandrite of the Kiev Caves

Venerable Ignatius was an archimandrite of the Kiev Caves monastery who is remembered chiefly as a monastic pastor and a healer of the sick. The surviving sources give few biographical details; he is known principally through his tombstone inscription and the liturgical service to the saints of the Caves, in which he is named the monastic shepherd and healer of the sick.

By tradition his gift of healing was tied to his liturgical ministry: the inscription on his tomb records that for his holy life he received from God the gift of miracles and healed many of the sick by his prayers, and accounts associate his healings with the prosphora, the blessed bread he distributed from the liturgies he celebrated. He is reported to have died around 1434, and a biochemical examination of his relics in 1982 indicated that he died at approximately sixty years of age.

He was buried in the Far (Theodosiev) Caves of the monastery, and he is commemorated together with the other fathers who repose there on August 28 and within the general Synaxis of all the Fathers of the Kiev Caves on the second Sunday of Great Lent. His individual commemoration on December 20 was assigned because of his namesake, the Hieromartyr Ignatius the God-Bearer, whose feast falls on that day.