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Biography

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Photius (Greek: Φώτιος; Church Slavonic and Russian: Фотий) was a Greek monk and hierarch who headed the Church of Rus' as Metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus' from 1408 until 1431. He was born in Monemvasia in the Peloponnese, a Byzantine stronghold in the Morea; no reliable source records the year of his birth. He was tonsured and formed in the monastic and patriarchal milieu of the late Byzantine world. After Metropolitan Cyprian died in 1406, the metropolitan throne of Kiev stood vacant amid rivalry between Moscow and Lithuania. In 1408 Patriarch Matthew I of Constantinople selected Photius, a Constantinopolitan candidate, and had him consecrated for the see, thereby reasserting the patriarchate's right to appoint the head of the Rus' Church.

Photius did not reach his flock until 1410. He first appeared in Kiev, then established himself in Moscow, already the de facto residence of the metropolitans. His episcopate unfolded against the partition of the East Slavic lands between the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Grand Duke Vytautas sought an independent metropolitan for the Orthodox of Lithuania and, in 1415, a council of bishops in that realm elected Gregory Tsamblak. Photius and the Patriarchate of Constantinople refused to recognize the election. For several years the metropolitanate was in practice divided. Photius worked to restore canonical unity and to keep the church of all Rus' under a single metropolitan obedient to Constantinople and resident in Moscow.

Contemporary and later sources portray him as a rigorous administrator. He recovered alienated church lands and incomes, asserted the fiscal and judicial rights of the metropolitan see, and issued pastoral letters, sermons, and disciplinary instructions. A substantial dossier of homilies and epistles is transmitted under his name. In Muscovite politics he supported the line of Grand Prince Vasily I and, after 1425, the succession of the child Vasily II against Prince Yuri of Zvenigorod. He remained a representative of Greek ecclesiastical culture in the north and of the canonical supremacy of Constantinople; he died before the Council of Florence and before Moscow's later moves toward autocephaly.

Photius died in Moscow on 2 July 1431 and was interred in the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin. In 1472, during reconstruction of the cathedral, the tombs of Metropolitans Cyprian, Photius, and Jonah were opened; Orthodox tradition holds that their relics were found incorrupt. He is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, above all in the Russian Orthodox Church. His principal feast day is 2 July, and he is also commemorated on 27 May together with Cyprian and Jonah in memory of the uncovering of their relics. He stands among the last Greek metropolitans of Kiev and all Rus' who governed the church from Moscow in the century before the establishment of the Moscow patriarchate.

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