Venerable Alypius of the Caves, Iconographer (+c. 1114)

The Venerable Alypius of the Caves, one of the first Russian iconographers, became a monk in the monastery of the Kiev Caves while still young. He learned icon-painting from the Greek masters who from 1083 worked on painting the church of the Dormition of the Mother of God in 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 he was sometimes paid for his work, the venerable father spent one part on buying the necessary materials, gave another to the poor, and kept only a third for himself. Saint Alypius was never idle, and stopped painting icons only during the divine services. He was ordained hieromonk and became famous for wonderworking in his lifetime: the blessed one healed a man of Kiev who had been seized with leprosy, and whose flesh had already begun to rot, by anointing his sores with the paints prepared for icons. There are known cases when angels helped the Venerable Alypius in his holy work. A man of Kiev built a church and asked two monks of the Caves to order icons for him. The monks forgot the request and said nothing to the saint. The man of Kiev waited a long time for the order to be carried out, and at last complained of the blessed one to the abbot; only then did it become clear that Alypius knew nothing of the order, but when the boards that had been given to the monks were brought, beautiful icons were already found painted on them. The church built by this man of Kiev later burned down, but the icons were not harmed. One of them, the icon of the Dormition of the Mother of God, which was afterwards called the Vladimir-Rostov icon (commemorated 15 August), was translated by the Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh to Rostov, to the cathedral he had built.

The blessed Alypius reposed on 17 August, not later than 1114. The Lord’s chosen one was buried in the Near Caves.