Ven. Sabbas the Sanctified

A Cappadocian who entered monastic life as a boy of eight and never left it, Sabbas came to Palestine at eighteen and was formed under St Euthymius the Great, who called him his 'child-elder.' In 478 he settled in a cave in the gorge of the Kidron, and around him grew the Great Lavra — Mar Saba — which has remained an inhabited monastery ever since, one of the oldest in the world. Made archimandrite of all the hermit-monks of Palestine, the counterpart of his friend Theodosius over the cenobites, he twice traveled to Constantinople in extreme old age to plead with emperors: winning relief for Palestine and defending the Council of Chalcedon before Anastasius. His biography by Cyril of Scythopolis is among the most reliable of early monastic lives. The liturgical Typikon that bears his monastery's name shaped Orthodox worship for a millennium.