Saint Peter Mogila

Petro Mohyla or Peter Mogila (21 December 1596 – 1 January [O.S. 22 December] 1647) was the Metropolitan of Kiev, Galicia and all Rus' in the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Eastern Orthodox Church from 1633 to 1646. 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.: 100  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.