The life of St Paisius Velichkovsky
Ordained a priest eight years later, he drew around him a brotherhood that kept growing, until he founded a skete dedicated to the Prophet Elijah and became, informally, a spiritual father to many across the Holy Mountain beyond his own community.
In 1763 he led sixty-four of his disciples away from Athos into Moldavia, settling first at Dragomirna Monastery and later at Neamț. There he gave much of his remaining life to producing careful, accurate Slavonic translations of the Greek Philokalia and other patristic writings on unceasing prayer, work that carried the Hesychast tradition of the Holy Mountain into the monasteries of Moldavia and, through his disciples, into Russia itself. That transmission helped spark a renewal of monastic eldership and spiritual life across Russia in the following century, a movement later associated above all with monasteries such as Optina. Paisius reposed on the fifteenth of November, 1794, remembered as the one through whom a nearly lost tradition of prayer was handed forward intact to a new generation.
