Our Venerable Father Aquila of the Kiev Caves, the Deacon and Faster
14th century · Deacon and faster of the Kiev Caves
A deacon of the Kiev Caves Lavra, ascetic in fasting and prayer.
Saint Aquila of the Kiev Caves — his name also rendered Achila — was a fourteenth-century monk and deacon of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, one of the foremost monastic centers of the Slavic Orthodox world. The surviving record is very slight: nothing is preserved of his birth, family, or entry into the monastery, and his memory rests on a few brief notices in the synaxaria and the tradition of the Far Caves.
Aquila served the community as a deacon and lived for a long period as a hermit, but he is remembered above all for an unusually strict discipline of fasting. The accounts say that he abstained from rich and sweet foods, rarely ate even vegetables, and during the fasting seasons took only a single prosphoron — the small loaf of liturgical bread.
This abstinence became the defining note of his memory. The liturgical tradition of the Kiev Caves holds him up as a model of restraint and self-control, and those struggling against gluttony or a disordered attachment to food have turned to him for help in mastering the appetites.
The date of his repose is unknown; he is placed in the fourteenth century, and his relics rest among the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves of the Lavra. He is commemorated on January 4, on August 28 with the Fathers of the Far Caves, and on the Second Sunday of Great Lent with all the saints of the Kiev Caves.
The historical record for Aquila is very limited, drawn from brief synaxarion notices and the monastic tradition of the Far Caves. The most consistent details are that he was a deacon, lived as a hermit, and was known for extreme abstinence in food.
The Kiev Caves tradition stressed asceticism, humility, and the remembrance of death, and many of its saints lived in caves or enclosed cells. Aquila's hidden life of fasting embodies this temperance; the Lavra commemorates him especially as a helper for those seeking freedom from enslavement to the passions of the stomach.
Unlike the great founders and writers of the Lavra — Anthony, Theodosius, Nestor — Aquila left no writings and no recorded miracles; his importance lies in the quiet witness of ascetic struggle, and his commemoration widens the Church's picture of holiness to include lives hidden and largely unknown to the world.