He was born 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 Demetrius (after
Saint Demetrius of
Thessalonika). After a brief period in
Chernigov, Demetrius 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. During the 1680s, Demetrius 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 (
superior) 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) or
Menologion in 1684-1705. He also found time to study ecclesiastical history of the Russian Orthodox Church. cathedral. In 1701 Demetrius 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, Demetrius opposed both the
Old Believers' and
Peter the Great's ecclesiastical policies, gradually drifting towards the party of
Eudoxia Lopukhina and
Tsarevich Alexis. Shortly before his death he forged the
synodic act on the heretic of Armenia, the monk Martin, a document to undermine the Old Believers by portraying them as adherents of heresy. He also made contributions to Russian education, opening a school and a small theatre in Rostov, where his own plays could be staged. ==Work as composer==