The life of St Dimitry of Priluk
While he served as abbot there, he met Sergius of Radonezh, who had come to Pereyaslavl to visit the local bishop, and a friendship grew between the two monks that would shape the rest of Demetrius's life; encouraged by Sergius's own example, he began to look for a more solitary place to pursue the ascetic life he wanted. With his own disciple Pachomius, he eventually traveled far north into the forests near Vologda, settling by the Priluki bend of the river and building there a church dedicated to Christ's Resurrection, the seed of what became the Priluki monastery, founded around 1371 and the oldest in that part of northern Russia. Demetrius shaped the community's life around a combination of strict prayer and fasting with active kindness toward the poor, feeding the hungry and taking in strangers who came to the monastery's gates rather than keeping its doors closed to the world outside. His friendship with Sergius, remembered as one of the defining relationships of his life, placed him among a wider circle of monks who carried monasticism north into territory that had known little of it before. He reposed at Priluki in February, and is remembered there still as a wonderworker and the father of monastic life in that northern country.
