Petru Movilă, a notorious personality and Metropolitan of Kiev, was born in Suceava in 1596, the son of Simion Movilă, who would later rule in Walla Wallachia, and his wife, Marghita, later a nun by the name of Melania. His father’s brothers were Ieremia Movilă, ruler of Moldavia from 1595-1606, and Gheorghe Movilă, the future Metropolitan of Moldavia.

After his father’s death, the young son of a ruler wandered with his mother and siblings to Walla Wallachia, after which they settled permanently in Poland. He began his education in his parents’ home and continued his studies at the famous Orthodox Fraternity School in Lvov (Lemberg) and at the Zamoiska Academy in Zamosč, where he studied Latin, Greek, Slavonic and Polish, in addition to the standard subjects of the time: grammar, poetics, rhetoric, dialectics, theology. He also studied Latin at the Sorbonne. In accordance with the custom of Polish nobles, he mastered the use of arms and took part in two Polish battles against the Turks, at Țuțora (1620) and Hotin (1622).

Thanks to an inner calling, but also under the guidance of the abbot of the Pecerska monastery, Archimandrite Zachariah Zacharias Kopastenski, he decided to become a monk. Thus, after his spiritual training at his estate in Rubiejovka, where he also built a church dedicated to St. John the New from Suceava, he was to be ordained a monk at Lavra Pecerska after 1625. In the fall of 1627, at the age of 31, he was elected abbot of the monastery. The Orthodox situation at that time was troubled by attempts to Catholicize the nobility. But through his five years of work as abbot, Petru Movilă managed to raise the cultural and ecclesiastical prestige of the monastery to a level unknown before. He worked on the restoration and embellishment of monasteries and caves where the relics of saints were found, and continued the printing work of his predecessors, bringing to light several books of mass and teaching.

The Archimandrite Peter carried out a rich ecclesiastical and cultural activity, continuing to print several books that had the purpose of defending Orthodoxy in the face of Catholic proselytizing. He founded a college, first at the Lavra, then at the Bratska Monastery, from which the famous Kiev Spiritual Academy would develop in 1633. He also placed at the Academy’s disposal his estates at Rubejovka, which he had bought before his monastic life.

On August 16, 1628, he signed the declarations of the Kyiv Ecclesiastical Synod, which condemned the clergymen who had adhered to the 1596 Union. He supported the election as King of Poland of Wladislav I in 1632, who recognized the rights of the Orthodox dioceses of the Kyiv Metropolitanate and maintained the “Orthodox Brotherhoods”.

The monument in Chisinau was installed at the intersection of Stefan the Great and Holy Boulevard and Petru Movila Street on 22.12.1996, sculptors – B. and G. Dubrovin. A high school in the capital also bears the Metropolitan’s name.