Petro Sahaidachny

Petro Konashevych-⁠Sahaidachny was hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossacks from 1616 to 1622, a statesman and a defender of Orthodoxy in early seventeenth-⁠century Ukraine. He is honoured as a right-⁠believing hetman by the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which has enrolled him among the saints in recent years.

He was born in the village of Kulchytsi, near Sambir, in the Przemyśl land, to an Orthodox family of the lesser Ruthenian nobility. His father was called, it seems, Konon (Konash), and after his death his mother took the monastic habit with the name Mokryna. The year of his birth is uncertain: some scholars give 1577-1578, others about 1582. He received his first schooling at Sambir, and then, between 1592 and 1598, studied at the Academy of Ostroh in Volhynia, where his fellow student was Meletius Smotrytsky, author of the famous Grammar, and one of his teachers was Cyril Lucaris, later patriarch of Alexandria and of Constantinople. The atmosphere of Ostroh shaped his convictions as a steadfast defender of Orthodoxy. While studying he wrote Explanation about the Union, a work in defence of the Orthodox faith, much valued by his contemporaries. He was then a private tutor at Lviv and Kyiv and assistant to the judge Yan Aksak.

Around 1600-1601 he joined the Zaporozhian Cossacks, took part in the campaigns in Moldavia and Livonia and showed himself a capable soldier; he was elected first leader of the artillery, then, between 1605 and 1610, head of the Sich. He became hetman, with interruptions (three times he was deprived of the mace), and led the Cossack host in 1616-1622. He made the Zaporozhian Cossacks into a regular army, organised expeditions against the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire, and in 1618 took part in the march on Moscow beside Prince Władysław. It is said of him that he took part in sixty battles without losing one. The role of his host was decisive in the battle of Khotyn in 1621, where the Polish-⁠Cossack army stopped the Ottoman army.

He was a protector of the Orthodox brotherhoods and their schools, enrolling himself with the whole Zaporozhian host in the Kyiv Brotherhood. He died at Kyiv on 20 April 1622 of wounds received at Khotyn. He was married to Anastasia Povchanska. In 2022, on 20 April, Epiphanius of Kyiv named him patron of the armed forces of Ukraine. He has no fixed day of commemoration.