Dimitra of Kyiv

Venerable Dimitra of Kyiv (born Matrona Alexandrovna Egorova, 1810 to 1878) was a nun and the founder of the Vvedensky (Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple) convent in Kyiv, after having been an officer's wife and a nurse of the wounded in wars. She was numbered in 2008 among the locally venerated saints by decision of the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church; this is not a canonization for the whole Church.

Life

She was born in 1810 at Silistra, in Ottoman Bulgaria, and was brought up in the Orthodox faith. In youth she moved with her family to Bessarabia, where she married the Russian officer Ivan Egorov. She took part in the defence of Sevastopol in the Crimean War (1853 to 1856), where she was wounded and concussed and tended the wounded on the battlefield, for which she received several decorations. Her husband died in that war, and in the autumn of 1856 she moved to Kyiv, to a house at Pechersk, near the Kyiv Caves Lavra. She knew the metropolitans of Kyiv Isidore (Nikolsky), Arsenius (Moskvin) and Philotheus (Uspensky). In Metropolitan Isidore she found a spiritual father and guide, who blessed her to form in Kyiv the first religious community of women for the widows and orphans of fallen soldiers and for homeless women. She devoted the rest of her life to the service of destitute women and orphans.

On one of her visits to Saint Petersburg she received secret monastic tonsure, with the name Dimitra, in honour of the holy Great Martyr Demetrius of Thessalonica. She gave all her property to the Vvedensky community she had founded, prepared the proposals for the building of two churches of the community and ordered the iconostases. While awaiting the decree of Emperor Alexander II establishing the community, she lived in Saint Petersburg, where she passed peacefully to the Lord in 1878, after the decree had been signed. She was buried provisionally at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, near the Feodorovskaya church, and later transferred to Kyiv. In the Russo-⁠Turkish War of 1877 to 1878 she had organized in her house a hospital for wounded soldiers.

Veneration

On 18 April 2008 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church numbered her among the locally venerated saints. Her relics are in the lower church, the crypt of the Vvedensky convent in Kyiv; when they were found in 1996 it was seen that the head and upper part of the body had remained incorrupt. Special days of commemoration, New Style: 22 March, the day of her blessed repose; 21 August, the day of the first return of the relics to the convent from Saint Petersburg in 1878 and of the second, from the Zverynets cemetery in Kyiv, in 1996; 16 September, the day of the removal of the relics from the convent and their reburial at Zverynets in 1960; 8 November, the day of her heavenly patron, Saint Demetrius.