Archbishop Philaret (Russian: Архиепископ Филарет, secular name Dmitry Grigorievich Konobeyevsky (Конобе́евский); 1805-1866) was the Russian OrthodoxBishop of Riga (1841–48), Archbishop of Kharkov (1848–59), and Archbishop of Chernigov (1859–66).
During his tenure in Riga (1841-1848) the Governorate of Livonia saw a religious conversion movement, as a result of which more than one hundred thousand Estonian and Latvian peasants converted to Orthodoxy. He also established a school in Riga in February 1846, which grew four years later into a seminary (Latvian: Rīgas Garīgais seminārs).[2]
His magnum opus is The History of the Russian Church (1847–48), the first complete and systematic outline of the evolution of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was seen as a clerical counterpart to Karamzin's great history of the Russian state and went through many reprints.[3] This work was later revised and expanded by the likes of Macarius Bulgakov and Yevgeny Golubinsky.