Pachomius of Gledin was an eighteenth-century Romanian hierarch and monastic who served as Bishop of Roman before withdrawing to a life of prayer and seclusion. Born in Transylvania, he spent his monastic and episcopal career in Moldavia and his final years near the Kiev Caves. The Romanian Orthodox Church venerates him as a saint, commemorating him on April 14.
By tradition he was born in 1674 in the village of Gledin, in the Bistrita-Nasaud region of Transylvania, and was baptized Peter. As a young man he left his home and went to Moldavia, entering the monastic life at Neamt Monastery, where he was in time ordained priest. The sources describe him as a man devoted to prayer and stillness who cultivated the inner life. After the death of the abbot, the community elected Pachomius to lead the monastery, but he held the office only about two years before resigning to return to a more solitary asceticism.
Pachomius was elected and consecrated Bishop of Roman, an office he held from 1707 to 1714. The accounts remember him as a careful and humble shepherd who attended to both the spiritual and the material needs of his eparchy. After some seven years he withdrew from the episcopate and founded a skete, dedicating its church to the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God and naming the settlement Pocrov Skete.
His final years were bound up with the Kiev Caves. The synaxarion relates that he reposed on April 14, 1724, while at the Pechersk Lavra in Kiev; his body was afterward returned to the Pocrov Skete he had founded. The Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church glorified him as a saint by a Tomos of November 2006, and his canonization was proclaimed at Gledin in 2007.
