Dometian of Neamt and Bistrita

Dometian was an archimandrite and great abbot of the Neamț and Bistrița monasteries from 1407 to about 1415. The Paterikon counts him among the most important abbots of fifteenth-⁠century Moldavian monasticism. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; the sources available to us give no day of commemoration.

He was a relative and disciple of Joseph Mușat, the first known metropolitan of Moldavia, from the time when Joseph was abbot at Neamț. He lived many years in community, learned letters and prayer from the more advanced monks, received priesthood and became a skilled spiritual father. Beloved of the fathers and of Prince Alexander the Good, he was named on 7 January 1407 abbot of Neamț and Bistrița, so that the two monasteries would not be separated; they remained under the same leadership for more than twenty years.

At Neamț, with the help of the prince and of Metropolitan Joseph, he renewed the church and cells and enlarged the community to more than a hundred and fifty monks. He founded a school of calligraphers and miniaturists, led by his disciple Gabriel Uric, and a library with many patristic works, largely copied in the lavra. At Bistrița the number of monks rose to more than fifty, and he set up a school of scribes from which came village priests, teachers, catechists and copyists. At his order the first Moldavian chronicle was written there, and in 1407 the monastery's commemoration book was compiled, in which Alexander the Good is called the true founder and the abbot appears as Dionysius, that is Dometian.

He was also confessor to Alexander the Good, whose secret counsellor he was called and whom he urged to build many churches. In his time small new hermitages appeared in the Neamț region, among them those of Topolița, Boiștea and Tazlău. The Paterikon also describes him as a good steward of monastic property. He passed to the heavenly mansions in 1415, in great old age, after kissing his disciples farewell.