Metric books have been kept in Russian churches since ancient times, often serving as the only way to document the key milestones in a person's life – births, weddings, baptisms, and deaths. Nowadays, in all churches, the sacraments performed in the church are also recorded in metric books. In 2011, the Holy Synod approved a unified form for maintaining such registers. This was done to standardize and bring them to a common standard, as well as to make record-keeping as convenient as possible for church officials. In the book you see before you, each page contains three tables, into each of which data about the marriage of one couple is entered. The recorded information includes the place and date of the wedding ceremony, who performed it, who got married, and some other details. The metric book is printed in two colors and has a sturdy hardcover, which will serve you for many years.
