The life of St Tsarevich Dmitry of Uglich
On May 15, 1591, not yet ten years old, the boy died in the courtyard of the Uglich residence of a knife wound to the throat while playing among other children.
How he came to that wound has never been settled beyond dispute. A commission sent from Moscow at the time concluded, from the testimony of most witnesses, that Dmitry, known to suffer from a form of epilepsy, had stabbed himself accidentally during a seizure while holding the knife in a game. Suspicion that Godunov had ordered the child's death to clear his own path toward the throne circulated from the beginning, but did not receive the Church's or the state's formal weight until 1606, when Tsar Vasily Shuisky, needing to discredit a pretender then claiming to be the surviving Dmitry, declared the death a political murder and had the boy canonized.
His relics, brought to Moscow that year, were found incorrupt, and he is venerated as a passion-bearer, one who met death in innocence though not explicitly for his faith, and remembered as a patron of children.
