Job Boretsky

Job Boretsky, known in religion as Job (Ukrainian: Iov Boretsky; secular name Ivan Matviyovych Boretsky), was Metropolitan of Kyiv, Galicia and all Rus from 1620 to 1631 and a central figure in the Orthodox recovery in the Ruthenian lands after the Union of Brest. He was born in Bircza in the Przemyśl region of Red Ruthenia, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, during the later sixteenth century. An exact year of birth has not been established with certainty, though later tradition often places it around 1560. He received his formation among the Orthodox brotherhoods of Galicia, teaching in and later serving as rector of the school of the Lviv Dormition Brotherhood, a leading centre of Ruthenian Orthodox education and printing. Later biographical tradition also links him with the Ostroh Academy.

In the mid-1610s he settled in Kyiv. There he helped to organize the Kyiv Epiphany Brotherhood and its school, of which he became rector, and he took monastic vows under the name Job. In 1615 he was made hegumen of St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery, which remained his residence and the practical centre of his later administration. From Kyiv he worked with brotherhood activists, monks, and Cossack leaders to sustain Orthodox parish life and schooling at a time when the official metropolitan see was in the hands of bishops in communion with Rome following the Union of Brest of 1596.

In 1620 Patriarch Theophanes III of Jerusalem, returning from Moscow, consecrated Boretsky as Orthodox Metropolitan of Kyiv, Galicia and all Rus, together with a number of other bishops, thereby reconstituting an Orthodox hierarchy on Commonwealth territory. The consecrations were performed with the protection of the Zaporozhian Host and Hetman Petro Sahaidachny and were not recognized by the Polish crown. Boretsky therefore governed without royal privilege, under the constant threat of legal repression. In 1621 he issued a Protestation defending the canonicity of the restored hierarchy and the civil rights of the Orthodox. He sought backing from the Cossacks, from Orthodox magnates, and on occasion from Muscovy, and he encouraged polemical writing, education, and the rebuilding of monastic and parish structures.

Boretsky's metropolitanate unfolded amid Cossack-Polish conflict and sharp Uniate-Orthodox controversy. He remained, until his death, the principal public representative of non-Uniate Orthodoxy in Kyiv. He died in Kyiv on 2 March 1631 and was buried at St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery. The see then passed, in disputed circumstances, to Isaiah Kopinsky and, after the settlement associated with the election of King Władysław IV, to Peter Mohyla, who obtained royal recognition for the Orthodox hierarchy. In Ukrainian church historiography Boretsky is remembered as the first metropolitan of the restored Orthodox Kyiv see after the Union of Brest and as an organizer of brotherhood education.