The life of the martyr and pious prince Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi
29.11.2018Kyrylo Mykhailiuk, Phanariot theologian
The life of the martyr and pious prince Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi
Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi (photo from the Ukrainianpeople website)
The life and exploits of the pious prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky may seem to be described quite fully. Many works of both ecclesiastical and secular nature have already been written about the holy prince, but, nevertheless, his personality will always attract attention. He has always been an example for many generations of citizens of our country. His earthly life makes us think not only about the role of morality in politics, which is relevant for today, but also about how a person can serve God in the position in which he is called. As for politics, it can be said that she created the most optimal model of Ukraine's relations with the East and the West for its time.
H. P. Fedotov in his book "Saints of Ancient Russia" specifically wrote about the holy princes (ch. 5). In Russia, veneration of holy princes was established quite early (XI century). The author singled out 4 groups in the host of holy princes (princes equal to the apostles, princes-monks, princes-passion-bearers and princes famous for their public service). And, of course, St. Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky is included in the third and fourth groups. The main motive of the feat, and as Fedotov emphasized, even the only one that is put forward here is: selfless love for the people, readiness to give one's soul for one's friends. This motive prevails in the lives of the holy princes-warriors for Ukraine and its people. Among them, the first place undoubtedly belongs to Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi.
He was famous both as a military figure and as a wise politician and as a martyr for Christ. His activity was of unsurpassed importance for the construction of the Ukrainian state. He remained forever in the people's memory. He was loved by his contemporaries, and his descendants are proud of him. Immediately after his death, a song about the Cossack Bayda appeared, describing the life and victories of this great man.
The death of the prince was a big blow for everyone. The greatest merit of Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi to Ukraine is that in the hour of the worst misfortunes and sufferings that befell the Ukrainian people, he preserved the integrity and unity of the Russian people, which was threatened with enslavement and complete destruction by the Turks, Muscovites and Crimean Tatars. Grateful descendants have never forgotten this brave man, a wonderful commander and an inspired patriot.
He is a pious prince. This number of saints includes lay people who became famous for their sincere deep faith and good deeds, as well as Orthodox rulers who managed to remain faithful to Christ even in the face of fierce death in their public service and in various political conflicts. Like any Orthodox holy prince, he is by no means an ideal sinless person, but he is, first of all, a ruler who was guided in his life by the highest Christian virtues, including mercy and manly love, and not by lust for power or profit.
Saints are not those who have not sinned. Saints are precisely those people who found the courage to trample on their self-love and come to God with repentance in sin. Sorrow of the heart for sins is the martyr's blood of a penitent soul. If a person dies for Christ, it means that he has a special relationship with Christ. This is not just an imaginary positive perception of certain historical events and a historical personality, it is the real faith of people that connects them with the Lord and Savior. To the martyrs, the Church prays that never again in the history of Ukraine would there be such times when people would have to pay with their lives for their faith in the Lord and Savior, when people would die only because their beliefs differed from the views on the life of the powerful of this world .
Bayda-Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi (from the site: kozaku)
Contrary to the common opinion that the Church canonized almost all rulers of the Middle Ages as saints, only some of them were glorified. Thus, among the saints of princely origin, the majority are glorified as saints for their martyrdom for the sake of their neighbors and for the preservation of the Christian faith.
What are the merits of Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi? This pious prince, like all people, was not perfect. It had its advantages and disadvantages. But throughout the ages, information about him remained as a wise ruler, a valiant military leader, a merciful and virtuous man.
Interest in the personality of the venerable Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi persists even today. Information about his life and activities, recorded in written records, is sparse, but mostly compiled by witnesses and eyewitnesses of the events, so they are read with interest again and again by both specialists and the mass reader. Unfortunately, we do not know all the details of Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi's life and activities.
In the 16th century, the Ośmapiѕсһеѕ Reih reached the peak of its power, its territory stretched from Iraq to Algeria and from southern Arabia to the Black Sea steppes. And all this power was aimed at conquering the lands of the infidels who did not practice Islam. European countries barely managed to stop the onslaught of Turks under the walls of Vienna, but still the threat of further attacks remained: Italy was waiting for the landing of the Ottomans from day to day, Germany was in a panic expecting an invasion. In the Mediterranean, Turkish pirates disturbed the ships and coasts of Christian countries.
In these conditions, the pious Prince Dmytro had to act, protecting Ukraine from attacks from the East, South and West. Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible of Moscow was the prince's first cousin (Ivan Vasyliovych's mother, Olena Glynska, was Dmytro Ivanovich's first cousin). The nephew treated his uncle respectfully - Vyshnevetskyi received rich gifts. In addition, he was given to feed the Bielivsk petite principality. Prince Dmytro did not take long to enter the service of the Moscow ruler.
While in the royal service, Prince Vishnevetsky visited the North Caucasus, where he brought several local tribes to the tsar and organized their campaigns against the Tatars and Turks and, in fact, became a semi-independent ruler. He also actively converted pagan aborigines to Orthodoxy
One of D. Vyshnevetskyi's greatest merits was the construction by his order in the early 50s of the 1557th century. a well-fortified castle on the island of Khortytsia. In fact, it became the basis for the creation of the first Zaporozhian Sich here. In 1559, Hetman Vyshnevetsky, at the head of the Zaporozhians, defended himself for almost a month against the thousands of hordes of Khan Devlet-Girey. And the very next year, in response to the khan's attack, a 1560-strong Cossack army under the leadership of Vyshnevetsky captured Perekop, and in XNUMX-XNUMX marched on the Azak (Azov) fortress.
Khortytsia Island (from the site: tsn)
French historians compared the military preparations of the Turks for the defense of Azov from the troops of Vishnevetsky with the preparations of the Ottoman Empire for the wars against Venice and the Holy Roman Empire. During this period, D. Vyshnevetskyi became one of the authors of the war project with the Crimean Khanate, which envisaged joint actions against the Ukrainian Tatars, Don Cossacks, Russians, and Circassians. In 1562, Vyshnevetskyi began the construction of a new Cossack fortress (the Khortytskyi castle was destroyed by the Tatars after 1557) on Monastirsky Island, which was located behind the Dnieper rapids. This construction was interrupted by the participation of the prince in another military campaign of the Ukrainian Cossacks. Now already the Moldavian principality, at the invitation of one of the contenders for the Moldavian throne to take part in the internecine struggle.
Martyrdom always begins at the moment of the saint's arrest and ends with his death. Unlike life, which begins at birth. In 1564, Prince D. I. Vyshnevetsky made his last appearance against the Shining Porta: with an army of 4 men, he invaded Moldavia, where at that time there was a conflict, but he was captured and sent to Istanbul. From the moment of his capture, Prince DI Vishnevetskyi became a bargaining chip in the internal political struggle for power in Moldova: he was handed over to the Turkish Sultan Suleiman I Kanun (the Magnificent) for execution.
After refusing to accept Islam and transfer to the service of the sultan, he accepted a terrible death: he was thrown on hooks driven into the fortress wall and after three days of torment, he was killed because he terribly scolded his enemies and their faith. Apparently, he was specially executed in an area where foreign merchants and diplomats lived - so that they could witness the execution. Thanks to the testimony of eyewitnesses, the story of the death of Prince Vyshnevetsky gained wide publicity and became the basis of a popular song in Ukraine.
Coat of arms of Dmytro Ivanovich Vyshnevetskyi
Sultan Suleiman decided to arrange a show execution of prisoners - on the shore of Galata (Istanbul district), Vishnevetsky and his associate, the Polish noble Piasetsky, were executed by hanging by the rib on a hook. Galata was chosen as the place of execution not by chance, according to historian Robert Mantran, this area has long been considered a "city of the Franks" in which immigrants from Western Europe and local Greeks lived. The Sultan wanted to demonstrate to the Christian world what the wars with the Ottoman Empire lead to.
On the part of the martyrs, there was no challenge to the empire or a desire to anger Sultan Suleiman. Sufferers died on hooks, not because they were tired of life and wanted to end it as soon as possible, but because the testimony of the Risen Christ was for these people the most important event in their lives, the truth for which they were ready to go to death .
From all the testimonies about the death of Prince Dmytro and his associate, two points can be highlighted:
1) Prince Dmitry Vyshnevetsky had a terrible choice between death and betrayal of faith. He was repeatedly offered to renounce Orthodoxy, threatened with inhuman torments and made appropriate warnings during and before his captivity.
2 ) Captivity and further imprisonment were carried out for refusing to accept Islam. That is, the death occurred for religious reasons.
Thus, we consider the very fact of martyrdom to be quite justified.
Western European and Polish testimonies speak of Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi's amazing insensitivity to torture during interrogations and during execution. Perhaps it is connected with this phenomenon - spiritual, sobering intoxication, when the sufferer is still alive, burns with the desire to die, "and there is no fire in him, a loving substance, but living water, speaking: go to the Father." Christian martyrs were revered as saints not for the fact that they could endure torture or were not afraid of suffering, but for the ability to bear witness to Christ even in the face of death. It was a very scary form of missionary work.
The very procedure of the execution caused a wide resonance in the entire European society, as the sophisticated brutality of the execution clashed with the unparalleled steadfastness and courage of the prince himself, worthy only for one thing - the behavior of the crown of thorns martyr for the Christian faith. Prince Dmitry could have avoided execution if he had converted to Islam and entered the service of the Turkish sultan, but he did not do this and chose death for the shame of apostasy. The Sultan and his close ones did not punish their sworn and successful enemy, they, in fact, took revenge on him for the victories they had won, their defeats and their own fear, which he had instilled in them for a whole decade.
The martyrs could not help but die for Christ, because they lived what they were offered to renounce. Martyrs are those people who, inspired by the Holy Spirit, gave themselves completely for their home - for the Holy Church. Martyr, translated from Greek "martirios", means Witness, not suffering. It is not the amount of blood and the magnitude of human suffering that the church culture emphasizes by venerating martyrs, but the evidence of the presence of God's love in man.
And when it became known about the death of Prince Dmitri, the brothers of one of the monasteries received "more fodder" from Tsar Ivan the Terrible, so that "Prince Dmitriy should be recorded and commemorated in the synodics in the great and ordinary, as long as God blesses the monastery."
The significance of Prince D. I. Vyshnevetskyi's activities lies in the fact that he was the first military commander who was able to oppose the Tatar raids on the outskirts of Ukraine not with passive defense, but with the tactics of preemptive strikes on their nomads. In 1556-1561, the steppe people did not even dare to approach the border lands.
March 31, 1999 - a silver coin with a denomination of 10 hryvnias
Prince Dmytro sheltered and freed our homeland from final enslavement, managed to prevent new terrible pogroms and keep the Tatars away, preventing them from settling in Ukraine and establishing their own order, we kept our native language intact, the Orthodox faith as it was and remained the main educational force of Ukrainian people, thanks to which we preserved the possibility of restoring our forces and their further development - we owe all this to Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi's activities, and this is such a merit that Ukraine will never forget!
But he was loved by the people not only for his military merits. His bravery and military ingenuity were combined with nobility: never once did Prince Dmytro raise a sword against his brothers and did not take part in princely skirmishes. Perhaps this provided him with popular respect and fame for centuries. He knew how to say such a fiery word to his people, which united, inspired faith and lifted the spirit.
This warrior-prayer showed himself as a far-sighted and wise statesman. Thanks to his efforts, Ukraine and its identity have been preserved to this day. After all, it was Dmytro who built his domestic and foreign policy in this way in order to protect Ukrainian lands from destruction. For this, he more than once acted as an ambassador to Tsar Ivan the Terrible on behalf of all the Russian princes. His clear mind, accurate calculations, desire to create turned out to be extremely important for the future unification of Ukrainian lands around Kyiv.
The castle-palace of the Vyshnivetskys in the town of Vyshnivets, Zbaraz district, Ternopil region, where in approximately 1517 Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi was born
The prince's campaigns in the Caucasus and trips to Moscow were useful not only for strengthening Ukraine's external authority. The bright word of the Gospel was brought to the Caucasus itself. In this way, the prince was also a preacher who contributed to the spread of the Word of God on earth.
Prince Dmytro has not returned from his last trip. His death was compared to the setting of the sun for the entire Ukrainian land. The role of the personality of Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi in the history of Ukraine is difficult to overestimate. He protected her from a formidable enemy, first as a commander, and then as a diplomat. In extremely difficult conditions of the yoke, he managed to save Ukraine from final destruction.
In addition to his military exploits, Dmytro Vyshnevetsky also performed spiritual exploits. He strengthened the Orthodox faith, actively contributed to the spread of Orthodoxy in the Caucasus. The prince built churches, rebuilt cities, gathered the dispersed people into their homes. The prince showed special care towards the Church, decorating the temples with books and dishes, giving them rich gifts and land.
The answer to the question of modern researchers: how to explain the phenomenon that the image of Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi occupies a strong place in Ukrainian cultural memory for more than four centuries, despite the fact that the interpretation of this image has repeatedly and thoroughly changed during this time? - consists in the fact that the foundation of his house was originally laid on stone (see: Mt. 7: 24-27). This stone is Christ! "Therefore, thus says the Lord God: Behold, I consider a stone as a foundation in Zion, a tested, cornerstone, precious, firmly established: the believer in him will not be ashamed" Isa. 28: 16). And again: "Therefore, He is a jewel for you who believe, and for unbelievers a stone that the builders rejected, but which became the cornerstone, a stone of stumbling, and a rock of temptation, and against him many stumble, not believing the word on which they and abandoned" (1 Pet. 2: 7-8).
"God is wonderful in His saints, God of Israel!" (Ps. 67: 36).
