Cyprian, Metropolitan of Moscow

Cyprian was a fourteenth-century Bulgarian monk and hierarch who served as Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus' and is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. He was born in the Second Bulgarian Empire during the earlier decades of the fourteenth century; later writers often place his birth near 1330, but no contemporary source records an exact year or a securely identified birthplace. Tradition links him with the learned Tsamblak family of Tarnovo and with the hesychast revival associated with the Bulgarian Church and with Mount Athos. He was tonsured as a monk, acquired a strong command of Greek and Church Slavonic, and lived for a time among the Athonite monasteries and in Constantinople. There he became a close collaborator of Patriarch Philotheus Kokkinos, whose Palamite theology and whose policy toward the Slavic churches shaped Cyprian's later career.

The political division of the East Slavic lands between Muscovite Rus' and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania led Constantinople to appoint a second metropolitan while Alexius of Moscow still lived. In 1375 Philotheus consecrated Cyprian as Metropolitan of Kiev, Russia and Lithuania, intending him to serve the Orthodox population under Lithuanian rule and, in time, the whole metropolitanate. Cyprian was received in Kiev and in Lithuanian Rus' but was rejected in Moscow for as long as Alexius remained alive. After Alexius died in 1378, Grand Prince Dmitry of Moscow refused to accept Cyprian and instead advanced the court priest Mityai, who died on the way to Constantinople, and then Metropolitan Pimen. Cyprian did enter Moscow in 1381, following the Muscovite victory over Mamai at Kulikovo Field, yet he was expelled the following year when Khan Tokhtamysh of the Golden Horde captured and burned the city. The resulting schism, in which Cyprian, Pimen, and briefly Dionysius of Suzdal all claimed the see, lasted through the 1380s and involved repeated appeals to the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Cyprian's position was secured only in 1389 and 1390, after Pimen's death, when Patriarch Antony IV recognized him as the sole Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus' and Grand Prince Vasily I admitted him to Moscow. He thereafter resided mainly in Moscow, while still asserting jurisdiction over Orthodox dioceses in Lithuania and the western Rus' lands, a claim the Lithuanian grand dukes did not always honor. As metropolitan he sought to reunify the church administration, to enforce canonical norms, and to bring Rus' liturgical books and services into closer conformity with contemporary Byzantine practice, notably through wider use of the Jerusalem Typikon. He was a prolific copyist and translator and the author of a Life of Metropolitan Peter, of official encyclicals, and of other ecclesiastical texts. Through his household and through South Slavic émigrés, including members of the Tsamblak circle, he transmitted hesychast spirituality and a renewed Slavonic literary culture from Bulgaria and Byzantium into Muscovite and Lithuanian Rus'.

Cyprian died on 16 September 1406 and was buried in the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin. In 1472, during the rebuilding of that cathedral under Ivan III, his relics were opened and described as incorrupt, which strengthened a local cult. He was subsequently glorified among the saints of the Russian Orthodox Church and is commemorated on 16 September, the day of his repose, and on 27 May, the day associated with the uncovering of his relics; Bulgarian and other Orthodox calendars also honor him. Later Orthodox memory presents him as a restorer of metropolitan unity, a liturgical reformer, and a principal channel of Balkan and Byzantine influence in late medieval Rus'. He was succeeded in the metropolitanate by Photius, a Greek hierarch from the Morea.