Baranovich, Lazar

Born about 1620; died Sept. 3 (13), 1693. Ukrainian religious and political figure and author; supporter of the union of the Ukraine with Russia. Also advocate of the independence of the Ukrainian clergy from the Moscow patriarch.

From 1650, Baranovich was the rector of Kiev College; from 1657 he was the archbishop of Chernigov. In 1674 he started a printing press in Novgorod-Seversk; in 1679 it was moved to Chernigov, where about 50 liturgical books and literary works in Church Slavonic, Polish, and Latin were produced. Baranovich was the author of sermons, panegyrics, and polemical works in which he defended orthodoxy from attacks by the Catholic Church. He published collections of his sermons, entitled The Sword of the Spirit (1666) and Trumpets of Sermons (1674). In 1671 he published in Polish the collection Lute of Apollo, which contains more than 1,000 poems, in which he wrote of love for his homeland and of the necessity for uniting the forces of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish peoples against their common enemies of the time, the Tatars and the Turks.