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History of Parish of St. Augustine, St. Augustine, Pa. |
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Biographical Sketch of Rev. Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin.
Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin was the only son of Prince Dimitri Gallitzin, of Russia, and his wife Amalia Von Schmettau Gallitzin, daughter of Marshal Von Schmettau, a noted Prussian General in the service of Frederick the Great.
The Golizins or Gallitzins were for centuries a noted family of Russia, famed for their military achievements, and were far superior in intellectuality to the Romanoffs, or Romanzoffs, the then, and until recently, the reigning family of Russia. "They were not," says a biographer of "Doctor" Gallitzin, probably one Samuel Riddle, Esquire, a great admirer although a Protestant, of Father Gallitzin, "of Slavic but of Asiatic origin." They were feared and hated by the Romanoffs and one of them was banished from Russia by Peter the Great for fear that he would marry Princess Anna, a sister of Peter, and supplant him in the Czardom. Another of them - a noted military commander, as most of them were - at one time with a military force, drove off a horde of Turks who were besieging a convent of Nuns on the southern confines of Russia, in gratitude for which service which saved the community from a fate worse than death, the abbess presented the rescuer with a silver reliquary containing a piece of the cross upon which Christ was crucified. Of that reliquary, more further on.
Prince Dimitri (Dimitri is Russian for Demetrius), having been appointed by his government ambassador to Holland, stopped in 1769, on his way to the Hague to assume the duties of his office, in Berlin, at the court of the king of Prussia, Frederick the Great, and having there met the daughter of Marshal Von Schmettau - Amalia - and being captivated by her charms, for she was both beautiful and cultured, sought and obtained her hand in marriage and with her proceeded to the Hague where the subject of this sketch was born in November, 1770, and two years later a sister - Marianna, or Mimi - was also born.
Prince Dimitri, being, if he believed in Christianity at all, a member of the schismatic Orthodox Church of Russia, and his wife probably leaning to a branch of the Lutheran denomination, if, in fact, she was not a skeptic of the school of Voltaire and others of that ilk, the home of the Gallitzin's could not, according to the biographer from whom I quote, be called a Christian home. The subject of religion was
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