 The Great Menaion Reader was compiled in the 1530s-1540s under the supervision of Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow.The Great Menaion Reader contains over 27,000 large-size pages copied by hand and artistically decorated.Metropolitan Macarius decided to compile the Great Menaion Reader for the purpose of centralizing the cult of the Russian saints and consolidation of ecclesiastic ideology, so no Russian secular literature was included.