Andrew and the Hills of Kiev

According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, the Apostle Andrew the First-Called sailed up the river Dnieper, halted beneath the hills where Kiev would one day rise, and blessed them, foretelling that a great city and many churches would stand there. The episode is a celebrated tradition of the Russian Church, though scholars recognize it as a legendary, etiological insertion prefacing the actual conversion of Rus’ under Vladimir in 988.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Source: The Russian Primary Chronicle

The account of Andrew’s journey to the future site of Kiev comes from a single, named source: the Russian Primary Chronicle, known in Slavonic as the Povest’ vremennykh let (“Tale of Bygone Years,” sometimes rendered “Tale of Past Years”). This is the foundational narrative history of the early East Slavs, compiled in Kiev in the early twelfth century and traditionally associated with the monk Nestor of the Kiev Caves Monastery (the Pecherska Lavra). The standard English translation is that of Samuel H. Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953), which renders the Laurentian recension of 1377 and remains the reference edition for English readers.

The Chronicle places the Andrew episode very near its opening, within the geographical and ethnographic preface that situates the Slavs among the peoples descended from the sons of Noah and describes the great river-roads of eastern Europe (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, 53–54). It is here, in the description of “the route from the Varangians to the Greeks” along the Dnieper, that the chronicler inserts the apostolic visit, hanging the legend upon the river geography he has just laid out.

The Narrative

In the Chronicle’s telling, the Apostle Andrew is preaching at Sinope, on the southern shore of the Black Sea, and comes to Cherson (Chersonesus, the Greek city in the Crimea near later Sevastopol). There he learns that the mouth of the Dnieper is near at hand. Resolving to go to Rome, he sails up the Dnieper and, in the course of the journey, halts by chance beneath the hills upon the river’s bank where the city of Kiev would later stand (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, 53–54).

Rising in the morning, Andrew speaks to the disciples who are with him. In the Cross–Sherbowitz translation he declares: “See ye these hills? So shall the favor of God shine upon them that on this spot a great city shall arise, and God shall erect many churches therein” (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, 54). He then climbs the hills, blesses them, and sets up a cross. After praying, he descends and continues on his way — the cross-planting and blessing furnishing the apostolic “foundation” of the spot long before any city existed there.

The Chronicle does not stop at Kiev. Andrew continues northward to the country of the Slavs around Novgorod, and here the narrative supplies one of its most vivid ethnographic asides: the apostle marvels at the steam-baths (banya) of the Slavs of the north. He reports to those in Rome that the Novgorodians heat their wooden bath-houses to a great heat, strip naked, douse themselves, beat themselves with young branches until they are nearly lifeless, then drench themselves with cold water and revive — and that they do this willingly, of their own accord, as a form of washing rather than a torment (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, 54). Andrew expresses his astonishment at the practice. The passage is generally read as carrying a humorous, even gently mocking edge — and many scholars detect in it a Kievan-versus-Novgorodian polemical flavor, the southern (Kievan) chronicler poking fun at the rough customs of the north while reserving the dignified apostolic blessing for Kiev itself (Franklin and Shepard 1996, 4–5).

The Legendary and Etiological Character

The Andrew-at-Kiev episode is widely recognized in scholarship as a legendary insertion rather than a historical report. Its function is etiological: it supplies the city of Kiev — and, by extension, the Christian community of the Rus’ — with an apostolic blessing reaching back to the very first of the Twelve, the “First-Called” (Protokletos). By having Andrew plant a cross and prophesy a “great city” with “many churches,” the chronicler grafts the Rus’ Church onto the apostolic age, centuries before the historical conversion (Dvornik 1958, 217–222).

The chronology makes the difficulty plain. The Rus’ were not Christianized in the apostolic era. Their official conversion belongs to the late tenth century: the personal baptism of the Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev and the mass baptism of the Kievans followed in or about 988 (the conventional date), after the diplomatic and military events surrounding Cherson and the Byzantine marriage alliance (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, 110–117; Franklin and Shepard 1996, 162–166). The same Chronicle that reports Andrew’s blessing also reports, far more soberly and at length, this real conversion under Vladimir — so the apostolic visit stands as a legendary prologue to the genuine historical narrative of Christianization that the Chronicle itself later supplies.

Francis Dvornik, in his classic study The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew (1958), set the Kievan episode within the broader medieval impulse to claim Andrew as founder for churches seeking apostolic dignity — above all Constantinople, which adopted Andrew as its apostolic patron to rival the Petrine claims of Rome. The Rus’ legend, drawing on the prestige of Andrew already cultivated in Byzantium, extends that same apostolicity northward up the Dnieper (Dvornik 1958, 138–222). Internal evidence also marks the passage as a later addition: it sits somewhat awkwardly in the geographical preface, it routes Andrew on an implausible itinerary (up the Dnieper toward Rome by way of Novgorod and the Baltic and the Varangian lands), and the bathhouse digression has the texture of folkloric embellishment rather than apostolic record (Franklin and Shepard 1996, 4–5).

[Disputed: The Andrew-blessing-Kiev episode is attested only in the Russian Primary Chronicle (early twelfth century; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, 53–54), is absent from earlier sources, and is regarded by scholars (Dvornik 1958, 217–222) as a legendary/etiological insertion prefacing the actual Christianization of Rus’ under Vladimir (c. 988). Its historicity cannot be established.]

Later Use and Significance

Whatever its origins, the tradition proved enormously durable and consequential. By supplying an apostolic root, the Andrew legend gave the Russian Church a claim to apostolic foundation comparable in dignity to the older sees, and it was invoked in later Russian ecclesiastical and political self-understanding — the assertion that the faith had been, in a sense, blessed upon the hills of Kiev by the First-Called Apostle himself, and not merely received second-hand (Dvornik 1958, 217–222; Franklin and Shepard 1996, 4–5).

Andrew accordingly became a patron of Russia, and the tradition was given its most conspicuous imperial expression in the Order of St. Andrew (the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle the First-Called), instituted by Peter the Great in 1698 as the highest order of chivalry of the Russian Empire. Its blue saltire (the X-shaped cross associated with Andrew’s martyrdom) likewise gave the Russian Navy its St. Andrew’s ensign. The apostle’s status as First-Called, his feast on November 30, and the memory of his blessing on the Dnieper hills together anchored Andrew firmly in Russian devotion and statecraft — the legendary prologue of the Chronicle having grown into a national symbol.

References

The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, trans. & ed. Samuel H. Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953).
Francis Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).
Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (London and New York: Longman, 1996).