Venerable Alypius the Iconographer of the Caves (+circa 1114) — August 17 – Old Style / August 30 – New Style

On this day, August 17 according to the Julian Calendar (August 30 civil calendar), the Georgian Orthodox Church commemorates the Venerable Alypius of the Caves, the iconographer. One of the first Russian icon painters, he was tonsured a monk in the Kiev Caves Monastery while still a youth. He learned the art of iconography from the Greek masters who from the year 1083 were at work painting the church of the Dormition of the Mother of God at the Caves.

The venerable Alypius painted icons without payment. If he learned that the icons in some church had grown old, he would take them and restore them. If at times he was given a fee, the venerable father would spend one part of it on the materials he needed, distribute another part to the poor, and keep only a third for himself. Saint Alypius was never idle, and he interrupted his icon painting only for the divine services.

He was ordained hieromonk, and even in his lifetime he became renowned for his miracles: with the paints prepared for his icons the blessed one anointed the wounds of a certain man of Kiev who had been seized by leprosy and whose flesh had begun to rot, and healed him. There are known instances in which angels assisted the venerable Alypius in his holy work.

A certain inhabitant of Kiev built a church and ordered icons for it. The monks forgot the request and said nothing to the saint. The man of Kiev waited a long time for the commission to be fulfilled, and at last complained of the blessed one to the abbot; only then did it become clear that Alypius had known nothing of the order. Yet when the boards that had been set out for the monks were brought in, beautiful icons were already found depicted upon them. The church built by this man of Kiev afterwards burned down, but the icons suffered no harm. One of them, the icon of the Dormition of the Mother of God, which was afterwards called the Vladimir-Rostov icon (commemorated on the fifteenth of August), was translated by the Great Prince Vladimir Monomakh to Rostov, to the cathedral he had built there.

The blessed Alypius reposed on the seventeenth of August, not later than the year 1114. The chosen one of the Lord was buried in the Near Caves.