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.