Dmitrii Rostovskii

(Dimitrii; secular name, Daniil Savvich Tuptalo). Born December 1651, in the small town of Makarovo near Kiev; died Oct. 28 (Nov. 8), 1709, in Rostov-laroslavskii. Russian church leader and writer.

Dmitrii was reared among the Ukrainian Cossacks. In 1668 he took monastic orders; he became father superior in various Ukrainian monasteries and in 1702 metropolitan in Rostov. He supported most of the reforms of Peter I but opposed state intervention in church matters. Toward the end of his life he drew close to the supporters of Tsarevich Aleksei. Between 1684 and 1705 he compiled a multivolume collection of the lives of the saints, The Chet’i-Minei, which he based on Russian, Greek, and Latin sources. He worked at the composition of a chronicle on the origin of the Slavic people and wrote An Inquiry Into the Schismatic Brynsk Faith (published in 1745), in which he tried to explain the origin of the schism and sharply condemned it. In 1702 he founded a school in Rostov where about 200 pupils studied the Russian, Greek, and Latin languages and geography; religious plays were staged in the school’s theater.