Saint Vladimir, Enlightener of Rus

On July 15, the Church commemorates Saint Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev, Equal to the Apostles, who reposed on this day in the year 1015. Through his baptism and the baptism of Kiev, around the year 988, Kievan Rus was set officially upon the path of the Church — the cradle of the Eastern Christianity of the eastern Slavs — and the Christianization begun then was to advance gradually through its cities and its lands. The calendar gathers in mid-July the whole beginning of this Christianization: on July 11 it commemorates Saint Olga, Vladimir’s grandmother, the first great Christian light of the prince’s house; on July 12, the Varangian martyrs Theodore and his son John, the first slain for Christ at Kiev; on July 15, the prince who completed what their blood and Olga’s prayer had begun.

Vladimir’s life does not resemble the lives of the venerable ones. The old chronicle of Kiev, written by monks who honoured him as a saint, does not conceal his sins from before his baptism: fratricide, debauchery, sacrifices offered to idols. It is precisely for this reason that the Lives of the Saints set him beside the Emperor Constantine and the Apostle Paul — men whom God took out of the midst of their error and made apostles of whole nations. The story of Vladimir is, before all else, a testimony to what baptism can make of a man. Not because the water mechanically erases a man’s freedom and his past, but because in Baptism a man receives the death and resurrection of Christ as the beginning of a life he must then labour at. Vladimir did not become a saint because he stepped into the font, but because, once he had stepped in, he did not return to the man he had been.

Olga’s Grandson

Kievan Rus in the tenth century was a young and pagan land. Its princes, descended from the Varangian Rurik, held the waterway between the Baltic and the Black Sea from Novgorod down to Kiev, traded and warred with Byzantium, and worshipped the Slavic and Norse gods. In the midst of this world a single lamp burned: the aged Princess Olga, widow of Prince Igor, had received baptism at Constantinople around the year 957 and returned home a Christian. Her son Svyatoslav, a fierce warrior, refused to follow her; he answered his mother that his retinue would laugh at him if he took up the faith of the Greeks. Olga prayed until her death for the son who would not, and for the grandchildren who could not yet choose.

One of these grandchildren was Vladimir, born around the year 960. His mother, Malusha, served at Olga’s court as keeper of the household; his father was Svyatoslav himself. The child grew up, then, near his Christian grandmother, but under the law of his pagan father. Still a boy, he was sent to rule at Novgorod, under the protection of his uncle Dobrynya, Malusha’s brother.

The Pagan Prince

After the death of Svyatoslav, slain by the Pechenegs at the rapids of the Dnieper in the year 972, his three sons divided the land and then tore at one another. Oleg perished in battle with his brother Yaropolk; Vladimir, threatened in his turn, fled overseas to the Varangians. He returned a few years later with an army of Norse mercenaries, took Polotsk — where he killed Prince Rogvolod and took his daughter Rogneda by force as wife — and then marched on Kiev. Yaropolk was lured to a reconciliation and treacherously killed by Vladimir’s Varangians. From the year 978, Malusha’s son ruled all Rus alone.

The chronicle describes the years that followed without mercy. Vladimir raised on the hill beside his court an altar to the gods, foremost among them Perun, the idol of thunder, carved of wood, with a head of silver and a moustache of gold, and offered sacrifices there together with the people. He lived in debauchery: the chronicler counts his wedded wives and speaks of hundreds of concubines kept about the princely courts. Over all this, upon Perun’s hill there began to flow human blood as well, sacrifices chosen by lot from among the sons and daughters of the city.

In the year 983, the lot fell upon John, son of a Christian Varangian named Theodore, who had returned from Byzantium and lived at Kiev. The father refused to give up his child, telling the envoys that their gods were wood wrought by human hands, while God is one alone, He who made heaven and earth. The enraged crowd pulled the house down upon the two, and Theodore and John died beneath its beams, the first martyrs of the Russian land. The Church commemorates them on July 12, three days before the prince who then demanded their blood, and who would later build a church on the very site of their house. The old chroniclers saw in their death the seed cast into the soil of Kiev: from it would spring up, in only five years, the baptism of the whole land.

The Testing of the Faiths

The Primary Chronicle of Kiev, known as the Tale of Bygone Years and traditionally attributed to Saint Nestor, preserved Vladimir’s conversion in an ample theological narrative, composed not as a diplomatic transcript but to show the providential meaning of the choice of Orthodoxy. In it, around the year 986, envoys come to the prince from the surrounding peoples, each praising his own law: the Bulgars of the Volga urged Islam upon him, the Khazars the Jewish law, the envoys from the Germans the faith of Rome, and from Byzantium there came a Greek philosopher. The prince listened to all and put questions to them. Of the Jews he asked where their land was; when they answered that God had scattered them among the nations for their sins, he told them he could not receive a law from men whom their own God had cast away from His face. The Greek philosopher spoke to him of the creation of the world, of the fall of man, of the Lord’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, and at the end showed him an icon of the Dread Judgment, with the righteous going to paradise and the sinners to condemnation. Vladimir looked long and said it was well for those on the right and woe for those on the left. The philosopher answered that if he wished to stand on the right, he should be baptized. The prince was not baptized then; he said he wished to inquire further.

On the counsel of the boyars and the elders of the city, he then sent ten chosen men to see with their own eyes how each people worshipped. The envoys passed through the Bulgars and found worship without joy; they passed through the Germans and saw rites in which, they said, there was no beauty. At Constantinople, the emperors sent them to Hagia Sophia, and the patriarch served the Divine Liturgy for them in all the splendour of the cathedral. Returned to Kiev, the envoys testified before the prince and the boyars that, standing in that church, they no longer knew whether they were in heaven or on earth, for on earth no such beauty is found; only this they knew, that there God dwells with men, and that sweetness they could not forget. Whoever has tasted what is sweet, they added, will not afterward accept what is bitter — and so they could no longer remain in paganism. And the boyars closed the counsel with a word that weighed heavily at Kiev: had the Greek law been evil, Olga your grandmother, who was the wisest of men, would not have received it.

In the manner in which the chronicle preserved the event, the choice of the faith was not made through a dispute won by arguments. The envoys brought back from Constantinople not a proof but a testimony: they had seen beauty, and that beauty was the beauty of the Liturgy — the glory of God dwelling among men. In her spiritual memory, Rus entered the Church through this door: the beauty of divine worship.

Cherson, the Blindness, and the Baptism

The circumstances of the baptism we know both from the chronicle and from the Byzantine sources, and the two illumine one another. In the years 987-988, the Emperor Basil II was passing through the gravest trial of his reign: the revolt of the general Bardas Phokas, who had crowned himself against him. Basil asked help from Kiev, and Vladimir sent him six thousand Varangians, the army that would found the imperial Varangian Guard. In exchange, the prince asked for something almost inconceivable by Byzantine dynastic protocol: the hand of a porphyrogenita, Anna, the emperor’s sister. The condition set by Constantinople was baptism. When the agreement was slow to be fulfilled, Vladimir besieged and took Cherson — the old Greek Korsun in the Crimea — thereby compelling Constantinople to carry the compact to its end.

Here the chronicle recounts the sign that sealed everything. According to it, before the bride’s arrival Vladimir was struck with blindness. Anna, having reached Cherson, sent him word to be baptized quickly if he wished to be freed of the affliction. The prince consented; and when the bishop of Cherson laid his hands upon him in the water of baptism, Vladimir recovered his sight and confessed before all that only now had he come to know the true God. A part of his retinue, seeing the miracle, was baptized together with him. At baptism he received the name Basil, after the emperor who was becoming his brother-in-law. He then wed Anna in Cherson, gave the city back to the emperors as a wedding gift, and set out for Kiev, taking with him priests, sacred vessels, icons, and the relics of Saint Clement of Rome, which were there.

The chronicler himself notes that, already in his own day, some said Vladimir had been baptized at Kiev, others at Vasilev, others in other places; he himself holds to the testimony of Cherson, and the Church has preserved this one, together with the year 988. The differences among the sources as to the exact place and circumstances do not change the central fact: in those years the prince of Rus received baptism and opened the way to the baptism of Kiev. And in the language of the Church, the old man died then in the water, and another Vladimir rose from it.

The Baptism of Kiev

Returned to his city, Vladimir began with the hill on which he had sinned. The idols were cast down: some hewn to pieces, others burned, and Perun — the head of silver and the moustache of gold — was bound to a horse’s tail, dragged down from the hill, beaten with staves in scorn of the devil who had deceived the people through him, and thrown into the Dnieper, with orders that it be pushed away from the bank until it passed the river’s rapids. The people of Kiev, who yesterday had offered it sacrifices, now saw it off with weeping; in a few days they would themselves go down into that same river, for an altogether different immersion.

The prince then proclaimed through all the city that on the next day all, rich and poor, should come to the river. The multitude entered the water — some up to the neck, others to the breast, the children by the bank, the parents holding their infants in their arms — and the priests come from Cherson and from Constantinople read the prayers of baptism from the shore. The chronicle says that on that day heaven and earth rejoiced over so many souls saved, and Vladimir, looking upon his people in the water, prayed aloud to God, Maker of heaven and earth, to look upon these new people, to grant them to know Him, the true God, as the Christian lands had known Him, and to confirm them in the right faith, and to help him against the crafty enemy.

It was a baptism decreed by the prince for his city, according to the understanding of the age, in which failure to appear at the river might be read as resistance to the sovereign — not the fruit of a long catechesis of each inhabitant. The sacrament remains the same, received by a whole people in a single day; but what the Church had to do was only beginning, for it would labour in the generations that followed so that what had then been received together might be taken to heart by each man.

On the spot where Perun had stood, the prince built the church of Saint Basil, his patron at baptism. On the spot where Theodore and John, the Varangian martyrs, had died, he raised the great church of the Dormition of the Mother of God, consecrated in the year 996, to which he gave a tenth of all his revenues — for which reason the people called it the Church of the Tithe. He brought clergy from the Byzantine world and laid the beginnings of the ecclesiastical organization of Rus under the omophorion of Constantinople, built churches through the cities and villages, and appointed schools for the boyars’ children, that they might learn letters; the chronicle preserves the detail that the mothers wept over the children given to schooling as over the dead, for the faith had not yet grown firm in them. The Christianization spread from Kiev to the other cities gradually, with few priests for an enormous land, in places with resistance and with harshness on the part of the officials — the sources conceal not even this — but the seed had been set in good soil: within a single generation, this land was already bringing forth saints.

The New Prince

The clearest sign of the change in Vladimir was not the churches but the almsgiving. The chronicle relates that he ordered that every poor and needy man might come to the princely court and receive food, drink, and money from the treasury; and for the sick and the infirm who could not come, he appointed carts laden with bread, meat, fish, vegetables, honey, and drink, which went through the city asking where those without help lay. The same man who had counted his women by the hundreds now counted his poor, that not one of them might escape him.

The change went so far that it disturbed the order of the land. As robbers and evildoers multiplied, the bishops and the elders of the city came to the prince to ask why he did not punish them. Vladimir answered that he feared sin: he no longer wished to shed blood, he who had shed so much. The bishops had to expound to him the order of God: the prince is set by God for the punishment of the wicked and the mercy of the good, and whoever spares the wicked does harm to the good. Vladimir listened and punished lawlessness again, after the custom of his fathers; but his question — the fear of sin on the lips of a ruler once accustomed to the shedding of blood — remains one of the most unusual pages of the chronicles of the age. The people felt this renewal and preserved it in the old songs, where the prince of Kiev lives to this day under the name of Vladimir the Fair Sun, the prince of the feasts at which the poor too had a place.

His holiness was not the perfection of a hermit. Vladimir remained to the end a prince of his time: he warred with the Pechenegs who plundered the land, raised fortresses of watch on the southern rivers, settled men in them, and divided his sons among the cities of Rus to hold it whole. But the direction of his life had changed, and the chronicle says it simply: he lived in the fear of God. From the years after his baptism, the sources no longer mention his debauchery; they mention his churches, his almsgiving, and his tears.

The End, and the Sons

The end found him with the sword still in his hand. In the year 1014, his son Yaroslav, who ruled at Novgorod, withheld the tribute due to Kiev, and the aged prince ordered the roads and the bridges made ready for an army: he was preparing to march against his own son, to his grief. That war did not come to be: Vladimir fell ill and, on July 15, 1015, gave up his soul at Berestovo, the princely village near Kiev, after thirty-seven years of rule, of which twenty-eight as a Christian.

Svyatopolk, the son who was then at Kiev, tried to conceal his father’s death, that he might seize the throne ahead of his brothers. But the prince’s faithful men took up by night the floor between the chambers, lowered the body wrapped in a carpet, and bore it in secret to the Church of the Tithe. There all Kiev wept for him — the boyars as for the defender of the land, the poor as for their provider, says the chronicle — and laid him in a coffin of marble, beside the Empress Anna, who had reposed a few years before.

How deeply his baptism had taken root was seen in those same weeks, in his sons. Svyatopolk sent murderers against his brothers Boris and Gleb, and the two young princes, though they had armies and could have defended themselves, chose not to raise the sword against their brother and received death praying, like their Lord. They were not martyrs in the ordinary sense, slain for the confession of the faith, but passion-bearers: they received death without avenging themselves, following the meekness of Christ. Boris and Gleb were the first saints of Kievan Rus whose veneration spread throughout the Church of the land. The father had been baptized in maturity, after a youth of blood; the sons, raised from birth in the faith received from him, died like lambs. Within a single generation, the baptism in the Dnieper had brought forth a willing sacrifice.

Veneration Down the Centuries

The veneration of Vladimir began early. Around the middle of the eleventh century, Metropolitan Hilarion of Kiev, the first hierarch of the see to come from among the locals, offered him in the Sermon on Law and Grace an ample praise: he portrayed him as a ruler with apostolic work, drew him near to Constantine the Great, and likened his apostolate in the land of Rus to the preaching of the apostles among the nations. His feast spread more widely in the centuries that followed. Ecclesiastical tradition has linked the strengthening of his veneration also to the victory of the young Prince Alexander Nevsky over the Swedes, on the river Neva, on July 15, 1240 — the very day of the commemoration of the Enlightener of Rus.

His grave shared the fate of Kiev. In that same year 1240, the Mongols pulled down the Church of the Tithe upon those who had taken refuge in it, and the prince’s coffin remained buried under the rubble for four centuries. The one who brought it to light was the son of a Moldavian prince: Metropolitan Peter Mogila of Kiev, who in the years 1635-1636 examined the ruins of the Tithe, discovered the coffin identified by tradition as the grave of Saint Vladimir, and set forth for veneration, in the Dormition cathedral of the Monastery of the Caves, the relic honoured as the saint’s head. A son of a Moldavian prince drew from the ruins the grave of the Enlightener of Rus — one of those interweavings of Orthodoxy across borders and centuries that history works in silence.

The Church calls Vladimir “Equal to the Apostles,” isapostolos, a title borne also by Constantine and Helen, Nina of Georgia, Cyril and Methodius, and his grandmother Olga. The title says what the Church recognized in his work: through him, the apostolic preaching officially embraced the land of Rus.

The Beauty That Baptized a Nation

There remains, at the end, the question his life puts to every reader: how does such a man turn back? The chronicle attributes to Vladimir no crisis of conscience described at length, no dark night of the soul recounted in detail. It shows him only the steps: the death of the Varangian martyrs beneath the collapsed house, the icon of the Judgment looked upon long, the envoys’ testimony of the beauty in Hagia Sophia, the blindness before the baptism and the sight after. God called the barbarian prince along the ways he could hear — through innocent blood, through fear, through beauty, and through sickness — and he, when he understood, looked back no more.

Whoever commemorates him on July 15 commemorates not a ruler without stain, but a man turned back from the depths, in whom grace worked so deeply that the killer of his brother came to fear punishing robbers, and the debauchee sent his carts of bread through the city, seeking out those who lay helpless. This is his true praise, greater than all the cities and churches he built: that he let himself be made by Christ another man — and opened to a whole nation the way to the same renewal.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is Saint Vladimir commemorated?

Saint Vladimir, Enlightener of Rus, is commemorated on July 15, the day of his repose in 1015.

Why is Saint Vladimir called Equal to the Apostles?

He is called Equal to the Apostles because through his baptism and the baptism of Kiev, the apostolic preaching officially embraced Kievan Rus.

When did the baptism of Kiev take place?

The Church tradition places the baptism of Saint Vladimir and Kiev around the year 988.

Read also: For the later fate of Christian Rus and its last anointed ruler, see Saint Tsar Nicholas II and His Family.