Tsarevich Dimitri, son of Tsar John IV the Terrible from his seventh marriage to Maria Feodorovna (from the Nagih family), was born in 1582 in Moscow. After the death of Ivan the Terrible, the elder brother of Tsarevich Demetrius, Theodore Ioannovich, ascended the throne. However, the actual ruler of the Russian state during this period was his brother-in-law, boyar Boris Godunov, who sought to establish himself and his family on the Russian throne.
To achieve this goal, he needed, first of all, to get rid of the legitimate heir to the Russian throne, who, due to the childlessness of Tsar Theodore Ioannovich, was the young Tsarevich Dimitri. To implement his plan, Godunov decided to remove the prince from the Moscow royal court. Together with his mother, Dowager Queen Maria Feodorovna, and her relatives, Tsarevich Demetrius was sent to his appanage city of Uglich.
Trying to avoid dangerous bloodshed, Boris Godunov first tried to slander the young heir to the throne, spreading false rumors through his adherents about the prince’s imaginary illegitimacy and forbidding him to remember his name during services. Since these actions did not bring what he wanted, the insidious Boris resorted to spreading new fiction about his six-year-old boy’s tendency to cruelty, allegedly inherited from his father. However, these fabrications did not achieve the desired goal.
Then Boris Godunov decided to take extreme measures. An attempt to poison the young prince with the help of Vasilisa Volkhova, the nurse of Dimitri Ioannovich, was unsuccessful. Through his accomplice, Andrei Lupp-Kleshnin, Boris found a familiar person, clerk Mikhail Bityagovsky, who undertook to kill the prince with his own hands. Sent to Uglich with his son Daniil and nephew Nikita Kachalov, supposedly to manage the zemstvo affairs and household of the dowager queen, Bityagovsky instructed Volkhova to take the prince out into the yard at the appointed time. On a Sabbath day, May 28, 1591, Demetrius was brutally killed by the conspirators by stabbing him in the throat and other parts of his body and thrown down the stairs.
At the sight of this terrible atrocity, the sexton of the cathedral church sounded the alarm, calling the people. People who fled from all over the city avenged innocent blood by arbitrarily killing the brutal conspirators. Subsequently, through his men sent to Uglich for trial, Boris Godunov managed to convince Tsar Theodore Ioannovich that his younger brother allegedly suffered from a falling illness and died after accidentally falling on a knife.
Tsarevich Demetrius was buried in Uglich in the palace church in honor of the Transfiguration of the Lord. Already during the reign of Boris Godunov, healings of the sick began to be performed at the tomb of the blessed Tsarevich Demetrius. In 1606, during the reign of Vasily Shuisky, under Patriarch Hermogenes, the holy relics of the passion-bearer were found incorrupt and transferred to the cathedral in the name of the Archangel Michael in Moscow by Metropolitan Philaret of Rostov and Yaroslavl.
The Lord glorified the relics of the blessed Tsarevich Demetrius with many miracles. Saint Demetrius of Rostov compiled the Life and description of miraculous healings through the prayers of Saint Tsarevich Demetrius, from which it is clear that those with eyes were especially often healed.
In Uglich, on the site of the murder of the holy prince Demetrius, a temple named after him was built, which was popularly called the «church of Tsarevich Demetrius on Blood». This church housed the handwritten Life of the Blessed Tsarevich, written by St. Demetrius, Metropolitan of Rostov.
During the Patriotic War of 1812, the holy relics of the blessed Tsarevich Demetrius were saved from desecration by the priest of the Moscow Ascension Convent, John Veniminov, who took them under his clothes from the Archangel Cathedral and hid them in the altar, in the choirs of the second tier of the cathedral church in the Ascension Monastery. After the expulsion of the French, the holy relics were solemnly transferred to the previous place — in the Archangel Cathedral.