Demetrius (Dmitry) of Uglich was the youngest son of Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, called the Terrible, born in 1582 to the tsar's last wife, Maria Nagaya. After Ivan's death the child and his mother were removed from Moscow to the town of Uglich, where on May 15, 1591, at the age of eight, Demetrius died a violent death. He is venerated in the Russian Orthodox Church as an innocent passion-bearer, a child who suffered an unjust and bloody end.
The circumstances of his death were disputed even in his own time and remain so among historians. An official investigation conducted at Uglich, led by the boyar Vasily Shuisky, concluded that the boy had inflicted a fatal wound to his own throat during an epileptic seizure while playing with a knife. A rival account, which gained wide currency, held that he had been murdered by agents of Boris Godunov, then regent of the realm and afterward tsar; modern scholarship tends to exonerate Godunov of direct responsibility. In the aftermath the boy's mother, Maria Nagaya, was forcibly tonsured as a nun and sent into exile.
Demetrius's death left the Riurikid dynasty without a direct heir and helped open the period of dynastic crisis and civil strife known as the Time of Troubles. His name was repeatedly seized upon by impostors, the so-called False Dmitrys, who claimed to be the tsarevich miraculously preserved from death; the first of these was crowned tsar in Moscow in 1605 and reigned briefly before being overthrown in 1606. The veneration of the true Demetrius as a holy passion-bearer stood in deliberate contrast to these pretenders.
In 1606 his relics were brought from Uglich to Moscow, where they were enshrined; the tradition records that they were found incorrupt and were the occasion of many healings. He is the latest of the line of Russian princely passion-bearers, joining figures such as the brothers Boris and Gleb, who are honored not for martyrdom in defense of the faith but for innocent suffering borne in a Christlike spirit.
