Petro Mohyla or Peter Mogila (21 December 1596 – ) was the Metropolitan of Kiev, Galicia and all Rus' in the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Eastern Orthodox Church from 1633 to 1646.

Family

Petro Mohyla was born into the House of Movilești, who were a family of Romanian boyars. Several rulers of Moldavia and Wallachia were members of this family, including Mohyla's father, Simion Movilă, thus making him a prince. He was also a descendant of Stephen the Great through the bloodline of his great-grandfather Petru Rareș. His paternal uncles were Gheorghe Movilă, the Metropolitan of Moldavia, and Ieremia Movilă, who also ruled Moldavia before and after the first reign of Simion. Petro Mohyla's mother, Marghita (Margareta), was the daughter of a Moldavian logothete, Gavrilaș Hâra. Petro Mohyla's sister Regina married Prince Michał Wiśniowiecki, and their son Jeremi Wiśniowiecki was Mohyla's supporter even though he converted to Catholicism in order to marry a Roman Catholic princess and thus inherit the Polish crown.

After Mohyla's father was murdered in 1607, Mohyla and his mother sought refuge in the Ruthenian Voivodeship, part of Lesser Poland. For a time, they lived in Kamianets-Podilskyi, and in 1608 they moved to Stanisław Żółkiewski's castle, where they stayed for sixteen years.

Career

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In the 1620s, Mohyla traveled to Ukraine, which at that time was in political turmoil due to internal and external factors, in part due to Poland's annexation of Ukrainian lands. He started preparing spiritually at his aristocratic home in Rubezhivka near Kyiv, where he also founded a church dedicated to Saint John the New from Suceava. He then settled in the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra (the Monastery of the Caves), which was the political, cultural, spiritual, and educational center of Ukraine. There he joined Job Boretsky, Zacharias Kopystensky, and Pamvo Berynda, and a group of scholars and Orthodox clerics who promoted ideas of national liberation and cultural self-preservation. The prevailing political instability affected all spheres of life in the country. The number of printed publications was significantly reduced and many schools were closed. In order to preserve their privileges before the Polish king, the nobility, in great numbers, started to convert from Orthodoxy to Greek and Roman Catholicism. belonged to the Eastern Orthodox Church, and Old Church Slavonic was used, until the 17th century, as the common liturgical language in Romanian principalities.

In 1632 Mohyla became the bishop of Kyiv and abbot of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. Because of his ties to several European royal houses, the leadership of the Orthodox clergy entrusted him to negotiate with the Polish Sejm (parliament) and the king to lift the repressive laws against the Orthodox Church and to ease the restrictions on the use of the Church Slavonic language in schools and public offices. Mohyla's diplomatic talent paid off. King Władysław IV reinstated the status of the Eastern Orthodox Church in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

A decade earlier, he published his Anthologion in which he emphasized the need for teachers to find unique approaches to each student when teaching since their abilities varied. Applying the same requirements to all students may not be the most effective teaching method. Mohyla stressed the need for students to ponder over and understand and not simply repeat scientific, religious, and moral truths.

Thus, Petro Mohyla is credited with laying the foundation for a cultural epoch which historians call the Mohyla period. One of the attributes of this epoch was book publication. Despite the political instability in Ukraine in the late 1600s, it had 13 printing presses, of which 9 were Ukrainian, 3 Polish, and 1 Jewish. The output of these presses was not only of a religious nature. For example, in 1679 the press in Novhorod-Siverski put out over 3,000 copies of various textbooks for elementary schools.

Veneration

Even during the lifetime of Metropolitan Peter Mohyla, as well as shortly after his death, panegyrics and speeches were created in his honor, which glorified the person and the actions of the hierarch. Twelve such texts from the 17th century in Old Ukrainian, Old Polish, and Latin are known. Among their authors are printers of the Lavra printing house, professors and students of the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium, as well as such famous writers and figures as Protosyngel Pamvo Berynda, Hieromonk Tarasii Zemka, Hieromonk Sophronii Pochaskyi, Monk Yosif Kalimon, Bishop Feodosiy Vasylevich-Baevskyi, Archbishop Lazar Baranovych and Hegumen Antony Radyvylovskyi. In their works, epithets and similes are used to glorify the metropolitan, which include symbolic interpretation of the figures of Mohyla's family coat of arms, analogies with the sun and other natural phenomena, characters of ancient mythology, various associations with his name, and biblical images and plots. These works indicate a special attitude towards the metropolitan among Ukrainian church and cultural figures of the 17th century.thumb|Monument to Petro Mohyla in Kyiv created by sculptors Borys Krylov and Oles Sydoruk|alt=

He is venerated as a saint in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Romanian Orthodox Church, and the Polish Orthodox Church.

See also

  • Synod of Iași
  • Vasilian College

Notes

References

General

Further reading

  • 3 vols.
  • (Reprinted in )