Demetrius of Rostov

Saint Dimitry of Rostov
20th-century icon of St. Dimitry of Rostov
Hierarch
Born	11 December 1651 town Makariv, Kiev regiment, Cossack Hetmanate
Died	28 October 1709 Rostov, Tsardom of Russia
Venerated in	Eastern Orthodox Church
Canonized	22 April 1757 by Russian Orthodox Church
Feast	21 September (Uncovering of Relics) 28 October (Repose) 23 May (Synaxis of All Saints of Rostov)
Attributes	Vested as a bishop, right hand raised in blessing

Saint Dimitry of Rostov (sometimes Latinized as Demetrius, sometimes referred to simply as Dmitri Rostovsky, Ukrainian: Димитрій (Туптало)) 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.

Demetrius is sometimes credited as composer or compiler of the first Russian opera, the lengthy Rostov Mysteries of 1705, though the exact nature of this work, as well as its place in history, is open to debate.

He is the author of several written works, out of which the most famous is The Lives of Saints ("Chet'i-Minei").

Born Daniil Savvich Tuptalo (or Tuptalenko, according to some sources) into a Cossack family in 1651. Soon thereafter his family moved to Kiev, and he entered the Kievo-Mohyla Academy at the age of 11. On 9 July 1668 he took his religious vows at St. Cyril's Monastery in Kiev and was given the monastic name of Dimitry (after Saint Demetrius of Thessalonika). After a brief period in Chernigov, Dimitry went to venerate the Byzantine Slavic Christian shrines of Belarus (at the time property of the Byzantine Rite Belarusian and Ukrainian Catholic metropolitans of the Uniate churches), still located in 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.