Dimitry of Rostov

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Statue of St. Demetrius of Rostov in front of the Rostov-on-Don cathedral.

Saint Demetrius of Rostov was a leading opponent of the Caesaropapist reform of the Russian Orthodox church promoted by Feofan Prokopovich. He is representative of the strong Ukrainian influence upon the Russian Orthodox Church at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Danylo Savvich Tuptalo was born into a Cossack's family in 1651 and entered the Kievo-Mohyla Academy at the age of 11. In 1669 he took his vows at St. Cyril's Monastery in Kiev and changed his name to Demetrius (Dimitry). After a brief stint in Chernigov, Dimitry went to worship the Orthodox shrines of Belarus, still a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at that time. In 1678 he returned from Vilno to Baturyn and settled at the court of the hetman Ivan Samoylovych.

During the 1680s, Dimitry lived mostly at the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, while his sermons against hard drinking and lax morals made his name known all over Russia. He was appointed hegumen of several major monasteries of Ukraine, but concentrated his attention upon the ambitious project of integrating all the lives of Russian saints into a single work, which he published as Monthly Readings (Четьи-минеи) in 1684-1705. He also found time to study ecclesiastical history of the Russian church.

In 1701 Dimitry was appointed Metropolitan of Siberia but, pleading ill health, preferred to stay in Moscow until he was invested with the archbishopric of Rostov. During his life in Russia, Dimitry opposed the Old Believers' and Peter the Great's ecclesiastical policies, gradually drifting towards the party of Eudoxia Lopukhina and Tsarevich Alexis. He also made invaluable contributions to the Russian education, opening a school and a small theatre in Rostov, where his own plays could be staged.

Dimitry was also active as a composer (although his musical education is undocumented aside from the standard music curriculum established by Feofan Prokopovich at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy), and many of his penitential psalms achieved wide circulation, not only in Ukraine, but in the Balkans as well. Many of these psalms became an integral part of Ukrainian folk-song tradition through the kobzari, itinerant blind singers.

Upon Dimitry's death on October 28, 1709 his relics were placed at St. Jacob's Monastery, which his followers would rebuild as Dimitry's shrine. A fortress on the Don River was named after him; today it is known as Rostov-on-the-Don.