Ecumenical Commemoration
Rulers of Kievan Rus & Evangelizers of the Slavs
July 15 · d. 1015
also known as Helga (Olga's baptismal name), Basil (Vladimir's baptismal name)
Olga and her grandson Vladimir were the rulers under whom the Kievan Rus' became a Christian people. Olga, princess of Kiev, was baptized at Constantinople around the year 957 and kept the faith alone, unable to win her own son; a generation later her grandson Vladimir, once a ruthless pagan warlord, turned to Christ and led his whole realm to baptism in the Dnieper. From their conversion grew the Christianity of the Eastern Slavs, and the Orthodox Church honors them both as Equal to the Apostles.
Olga was the widow of Prince Igor of Kiev, the chief city of the Rus', a fierce Slavic and Viking people on the wooded rivers north of the Black Sea, today Kyiv in Ukraine. When the Drevlians killed her husband, Olga ruled in her young son's place, and the chronicles remember her first as a pagan queen who took a terrible revenge on her husband's murderers. But around the year 957 she journeyed to Constantinople, the golden capital of the Christian East, today Istanbul, and there she was baptized, taking the name Helena, with the emperor himself standing as her godfather. She came home a Christian to a heathen court. She built no Christian nation; her own son Svyatoslav loved the old gods and the warrior's life and would not hear her. She died in 969 with her great hope unfulfilled, having asked only that she be buried as a Christian. Yet the chronicler saw further than she could: "Olga was the precursor of the Christian land," he wrote, in the translation of Samuel Cross and Olgerd Sherbowitz-Wetzor, "even as the dayspring precedes the sun and as the dawn precedes the day."
The sun was her grandson. Vladimir seized Kiev in 980 after killing his brother, and in his youth he was everything his grandmother was not: a man of many wives, a builder of pagan idols, a warlord who fed the old gods. But he came to see that the old religion could not hold a kingdom, and the most famous story the Rus' ever told is of how he searched for a faith, sending envoys to the Muslims, the Latin Christians, and the Greeks. When his men came back from the Divine Liturgy in the great church of Hagia Sophia, they could only stammer: "we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty. We know only that God dwells there among men." And when Vladimir's counsellors weighed the choice, they pointed back one generation: "If the Greek faith were evil, it would not have been adopted by your grandmother Olga, who was wiser than all other men."
So Vladimir was baptized, around the year 988, and married Anna, the sister of the Byzantine emperor, an honor no foreign prince had ever been granted. He came back to Kiev and called his people down to the river Dnieper, and the old idols were dragged from their high places and thrown into the water while the Rus' went down into it to be made Christians. The chronicles say the violent prince became another man: that he fed the poor from his own table, built churches, brought in Greek priests, and grew so reluctant to shed blood that the bishops had to remind him a ruler must sometimes punish.
The grandmother had sown in tears and seen no harvest; the grandson reaped a Christian nation. From the faith those two received, Byzantine in its worship and Slavic in its tongue, came the Christianity of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, a thousand years of it, with all its icons and its singing and its long endurance. Olga had been the dawn, faithful in the dark before the light; and the church keeps them together, the dawn and the day, to say that no faithfulness is ever wasted, even when its fruit is hidden from the one who plants it.
How we know Olga and Vladimir is chiefly from the Russian Primary Chronicle, the Tale of Bygone Years, compiled in Kiev around the 1110s, more than a century after Vladimir's baptism. It is a later account, written by monks to tell the story of a Christian people's beginnings, and it must be read as such. The celebrated tale of Vladimir's "investigation of the religions," with its envoys and their verdicts, is widely regarded by historians as a literary set-piece rather than a record of real embassies, and the dramatic detail of Olga's revenge on the Drevlians is legendary in its particulars. What stands on firmer ground is confirmed from outside: Byzantine sources record Olga's reception at the court of Constantine VII, and they confirm the political core of Vladimir's conversion, the alliance with the emperor Basil II, the troops Vladimir sent him, and the extraordinary marriage to the princess Anna for which baptism was the price. Olga died in 969 and Vladimir in 1015; her Christian name is usually given as Helena, after the empress who by tradition was her godmother. The broad facts are secure, the dramatic scenes devout tradition.
Olga and Vladimir are both venerated in the Eastern Orthodox Church as Equal to the Apostles, the title reserved for those who spread the faith as the apostles did. Olga's own feast in the Orthodox calendar falls on July 11 and Vladimir's on July 15, and the two are remembered together, grandmother and grandson, as the founders of Eastern Slavic Christianity. In icons they are shown crowned and robed in the Byzantine manner, often holding a model of a church, Vladimir bearded and kingly, Olga as an elder princess with her cross. Their memory is shared and contested heritage among the Orthodox of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus alike; the church keeps to the older name, the Kievan Rus', the river-kingdom out of which all those later nations grew. They are honored as the enlighteners of their people, the two through whom a heathen land was given the gospel.
Further reading. The one essential source for both lives is the Russian Primary Chronicle, in the translation of Samuel Cross and Olgerd Sherbowitz-Wetzor; nearly every story told of Olga and Vladimir comes from it, and it should be read with the knowledge that it is a monastic history written a century after the events. For the historical setting, Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard's The Emergence of Rus 750 to 1200 is the standard accessible account of the kingdom and its conversion.
Online resources. Extracts from the Primary Chronicle in the Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor translation, including the conversion narrative, are hosted in several university source collections online.
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servants Olga and Vladimir to preach the Gospel to the people of Kievan Rus: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11