Saint Pablo el Padre

Saint Paul of Patras is a saint of the Orthodox Church. He was the abbot of a coastal laura belonging to Saint Catherine's Monastery in the desert of Raithu. He was massacred by Ethiopian Saracens along with 32 other fathers. He lived at the end of the 3rd century during the reigns of emperors Valentinian and Valens, and his memory is celebrated on January 14. His martyrdom is recorded in the Holy Synaxarion in a description by the Egyptian monk Ammonius. Although the venerable martyr Paul of Patras was unknown until then, in 1947, the protosyncellus and archimandrite Eustathios Eustathopoulos, later Metropolitan of Gortyna and Megalopolis, arranged for the printing of the service of the Holy Venerable Martyrs, the Abbots slain in Sinai and Raithu (reprinting a text he found in an old book in 1940 in Kefalonia, where he was serving as a teacher) and commissioned an icon with the inscription Saint Venerable Martyr Paul, from Patras of Achaia. The icon was painted in 1952 by the artist Takis Prionas. Subsequently, the archimandrite established the celebration of the saint during the 1960s with a festive commemoration and Divine Liturgy.