Elia was born at Reggio Calabria between 860 and 865 — tradition sets his birth in 863 — to Pietro and Leontò (Leonzia), wealthy nobles of the city. He is called "Speleota," from the Greek word for a dweller in caves, to distinguish him from the prophet Elijah and from Saint Elias the Younger. His Life relates that as a child he lost the use of a hand in an accident, so that he was nicknamed "monocheir," the one-handed; from his earliest years the boy learned that what the world counts a loss can be offered back to God.
At eighteen his mother pressed him to marry a young noblewoman and found a family. Elia refused. Hearing within him a call that admitted no compromise, he left his father's house in secret and went to do penance at Taormina, and then as a pilgrim to Rome. There he received the monastic habit of Saint Basil the Great, being received among the Basilian monks in the tradition associated with Grottaferrata. He had exchanged rank, inheritance, and marriage for the poverty of Christ, and never looked back.
After his early monastic formation he returned to Reggio Calabria, but the thirst for a deeper spiritual schooling drove him eastward: with the monk Arsenius (of Armo) he sailed to Patras in Greece, seeking instruction and growth in the ways of prayer. During his absence the Saracens landed on the Calabrian coast, slaughtering the people and carrying off many into slavery. When Elia came home to a land wounded and terrified, he did not seek safety but solitude for the sake of all: he withdrew to a cave near Melicuccà to live in penance, and with him went two monks, Cosmas and Vitalis.
The cave became a lamp set on a hill. From the surrounding villages pilgrims began to stream to the hermit, drawn by the fame of his holiness, seeking comfort, counsel, and courage in a time of raids and ruin. Elia received them all. Tradition remembers him as a man of piercing spiritual discernment who read hearts, dispelled discouragement, healed the sick, and drove out demons; legend even says the wild bears obeyed his word. Disciples gathered and remained, so that the solitary's grotto grew into a monastic community, and Elia, who had fled the world's honors, found himself a father of monks and a pillar of Italo-Greek monasticism in southern Italy. Toward the end of his long life he is said to have moved to the monastery of Aulon in Calabria.
His trust in Providence was absolute. When a brother asked where he found his daily bread, he answered that God had promised through the Apostle never to abandon His own, since He gives bread even to the dogs. When a sick man wished to travel to Palermo in search of a cure, Elia bade him bear patiently the chastisement God had sent. He himself, with the same serene realism, dug with his own hands the grave in the rock where he wished to be laid — an act in which devout tradition has always read the measure of his humility.
Elia died on 11 September 960, having lived about ninety-seven years, and was buried in the tomb he had prepared in the cave of Melicuccà. His body rested there undisturbed until 2 August 1747, when a young man of Melicuccà, Antonio Germanò, discovered the holy bones and, it is recorded, was instantly and miraculously cured of a grave illness at the mere sight of the relics; the event was attested by a public deed of the local notary Carmelo Fantoni on 12 August of that same year. The cave where he prayed still holds the spring called the "water from the garden of Saint Elia," an àghiasma or sacred source, where dripping water collects in the stone and to which many graces have been attributed.
The Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church alike honor him, and his liturgical memory is kept on 11 September, the day of his death. Around the grotto of Melicuccà the sanctuary of Saint Elia the Speleota remains a place of pilgrimage for the people of Calabria.
May Saint Elia the Speleota obtain for us the courage to refuse whatever would soften our love of God, and teach us today the humility and patient trust in Providence that made his cave a fountain of healing for a suffering people.
