The life of St Dimitri of Rostov
His twelve-volume Chetii-Minei did not start from nothing but carried forward a labor stretching back through the centuries, drawing on the earlier Great Menaion Reader compiled by Metropolitan Macarius and, further back still, on the Byzantine hagiographer Symeon Metaphrastes, whose own work had reshaped the saints' lives for readers of his age just as Demetrius now reshaped them again for his.
Published across several installments between 1689 and 1705, the finished collection became one of the most cherished and widely read books among Russian Orthodox believers, read in homes and monasteries alike for generations afterward. Not long after the great work was substantially complete, he was made Metropolitan of Rostov and Yaroslavl in 1702, an office he held until his death.
He reposed on October 28, 1709, remembered less for any single sermon or act than for having given the saints of every age a fresh telling in his own Russian tongue, the latest link in a chain of such retellings reaching back to Byzantium itself.
