Vyshgorod

Vyshgorod, a fortified princely town a short way up the Dnieper north of Kiev, was the burial place and cult center of Boris and Gleb: Boris was first laid by the church of St. Basil there, and Gleb’s body, recovered from the wild near Smolensk, was brought to lie beside him. Over the relics rose a succession of churches — wooden, then stone — and into them the relics were solemnly translated, in 1072 under the sons of Yaroslav and again in 1115 under Vladimir Monomakh. This file sets out what the Primary Chronicle and the Skazanie‘s miracle collection report of the shrine, the reported incorruption of the relics, and the two great translations, distinguishing the datable institutional events from the hagiographic claims and noting the relics’ uncertain fate after the Mongol sack of Kiev in 1240.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Passion-Bearers; first canonized Rus saints)

The Town and the First Burial

The shrine of Boris and Gleb stood not at Kiev itself but at Vyshgorod, a fortified settlement on a height above the Dnieper a short distance upstream from the capital. Vyshgorod was an old princely town — the Primary Chronicle associates it with Princess Olga in the tenth century — and in the eleventh it served as a residence and stronghold within the immediate orbit of Kiev (Russian Primary Chronicle, on Vyshgorod as a princely town; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; Franklin and Shepard 1996, on Vyshgorod’s place in the Kievan complex). Its proximity to Kiev mattered to the cult: the brothers’ shrine lay near enough to the seat of the grand princes to be a dynastic sanctuary, yet was its own honored place.

According to the tradition, Boris, killed on the river Alta, was brought to Vyshgorod and buried by the church of St. Basil (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015 and following; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; see The Killing of Boris). This wooden church of St. Basil — a dedication to St. Basil the Great, the baptismal patron of Vladimir, who had taken the name Basil at his christening — is the first structure named in the shrine’s history, and the burial of Boris beside it is the foundational act of the cult’s material life (Lenhoff 1989, on the shrine’s beginnings at St. Basil’s; Fedotov 1946).

Gleb came later. The Skazanie relates that Gleb, killed near Smolensk far up the Dnieper, was not at first honorably buried at all: his body was left in the wild, between two logs on the riverbank, and lay there for a time before it was found (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; see The Killing of Gleb). When the body was recovered, the Skazanie reports, it was brought down to Vyshgorod and laid beside Boris, so that the two brothers — separated in their deaths by distance and by months — were reunited in a single resting place (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The gathering of both bodies at St. Basil’s is the event from which the joint cult of “Boris-and-Gleb,” the two always named and venerated together, properly begins (Lenhoff 1989, on the joint character of the cult; see The Formation of the Cult).

The Reported Incorruption of the Relics

Central to the shrine’s claim, in the logic of the hagiography, was the condition of the relics. The Skazanie and its miracle collection report that the bodies of the brothers were found and kept incorrupt — preserved from decay, and, in the recovery of Gleb in particular, untouched by the beasts and birds of the wild place where the body had lain, with signs of light and fragrance marking the spot (Skazanie and the Skazanie o chudesakh, the Tale of the Miracles, in Hollingsworth 1992; Nestor’s Chtenie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The incorruption is, in the texts’ framing, the first and clearest of the wonders: the visible sign that God had vindicated the murdered innocents and that their graves were the graves of saints.

These claims are reported here as what the sources attest, pinned to those texts and not certified as historical fact, in keeping with METHODOLOGY.md §3.5. The incorruption of relics is a standard feature of the hagiographic genre, and its function in the Boris and Gleb texts is to establish sanctity rather than to record a forensic observation (Fedotov 1946, on the role of incorruption and the wonders in the establishment of the cult; Lenhoff 1989). What the historian can say is that the tradition consistently held the relics to be incorrupt and wonder-working, and that this conviction is what drove the successive rebuildings and translations: a body believed to be a saint’s, and to work miracles, demanded an ever more honorable setting (Lenhoff 1989).

The Succession of Churches

The history of the Vyshgorod shrine is, in large part, a history of its churches — for the building of a finer church over the relics, and the translation of the relics into it, was the public form the cult’s growth took. The sources and the scholarship trace a succession of structures across the eleventh and early twelfth centuries.

The first was the wooden church of St. Basil, beside which Boris was buried and to which Gleb was brought; it sheltered the relics in the cult’s earliest phase under Yaroslav the Wise (Lenhoff 1989; Fedotov 1946). The tradition relates that this church was at some point destroyed — by fire, in the hagiographic narrative — and that a new and grander church was built to house the relics more worthily as the veneration grew (Skazanie and the miracle collection, in Hollingsworth 1992, on the building of churches over the relics). The pattern that the texts present is one of repeated elevation: each stage of the cult’s growth, marked by new miracles, called for a better church and a translation of the relics into it (Lenhoff 1989, on the church-building as an index of the cult’s rising status).

The culmination, on the eve of the cult’s medieval maturity, was a great stone church at Vyshgorod, built to receive the relics in their most honorable setting. The construction of this stone church was undertaken across the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries and is bound up with the translation of 1115 (Franklin and Shepard 1996, on the stone church at Vyshgorod; Lenhoff 1989). Precise architectural particulars of the successive churches — dimensions, plan, the exact sequence of building and destruction — are imperfectly recoverable from the sources and are reconstructed by historians of Rus’ architecture from the hagiographic notices and from later evidence; this file does not assert measurements or details the sources will not bear.

The Translation of 1072

The first of the two great translations is the best documented, for the Primary Chronicle records it under a specific year. In 1072, the Chronicle reports, the relics of Boris and Gleb were solemnly translated into a new church at Vyshgorod, in a ceremony attended by the three reigning sons of Yaroslav — Iziaslav, Sviatoslav, and Vsevolod — together with the metropolitan and a gathering of bishops, abbots, and clergy (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1072; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The Chronicle names the metropolitan who presided as Georgi (George) of Kiev (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1072; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The participation of the whole senior generation of the dynasty and of the head of the Rus’ Church makes the 1072 translation the most public, hierarchically sanctioned moment in the cult’s early history — which is why some scholars read it as the effective establishment, or the formal recognition, of the cult of Boris and Gleb (Lenhoff 1989; and see the dispute set out in The Formation of the Cult).

The Chronicle’s account carries the marks of an eyewitness or near-contemporary report: it describes the moving of the wooden coffins, the carrying of the relics in procession, and the response of the assembled princes and people (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1072; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). Whatever its precise sources, the entry establishes the historical fact behind the cult’s institutional rise: by 1072 the veneration of Boris and Gleb was firmly enough established to draw the grand princes and the metropolitan to Vyshgorod for a solemn translation into a church built for the purpose (Lenhoff 1989; Franklin and Shepard 1996).

The Translation of 1115

The second great translation came two generations later, under the next dominant figure of the dynasty. In 1115, the relics were translated again — into the great stone church at Vyshgorod — in a ceremony associated above all with Vladimir Monomakh and his princely cousins, the leading men of the Rus’ of that generation (Franklin and Shepard 1996, on the 1115 translation under Monomakh; Lenhoff 1989). Where the 1072 translation is reported chiefly by the Primary Chronicle, the 1115 translation is narrated most fully by the hagiographic tradition — by the Skazanie‘s miracle collection (the Skazanie o chudesakh), which makes the translation into the stone church a climactic episode of the brothers’ continuing wonder-working (the miracle collection, in Hollingsworth 1992).

A memorable feature of the 1115 narrative is a reported dispute among the princes over where the shrines should be set within the new church — whether the relics should be placed in the center, beneath the dome, or to one side — a disagreement the hagiographic account resolves by a sign, the saints themselves indicating the proper place (the miracle collection, in Hollingsworth 1992; Lenhoff 1989, on the translation narrative). The episode, whatever its historical kernel, captures the dynastic stakes of the shrine: the placing of the relics was a matter the senior princes contended over, because the shrine of Boris and Gleb was a dynastic sanctuary and its arrangement carried weight.

The two translations together — 1072 and 1115 — frame the high Kievan period of the cult: the relics raised, two generations apart, into ever grander churches by the assembled dynasty, with the head of the Church presiding. They are the chief datable events of the shrine’s history and the spine of its institutional life.

[Disputed: the dates of the two principal translations are reported by the sources and generally accepted as 1072 and 1115, but the source bases differ in kind. The translation of 1072 is dated by the Russian Primary Chronicle s.a. 1072 (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953) and is securely attested. The translation of 1115 under Vladimir Monomakh is narrated chiefly by the hagiographic miracle collection (the Skazanie o chudesakh, in Hollingsworth 1992) and is dated to 1115 in the scholarly literature (Franklin and Shepard 1996; Lenhoff 1989); some details of its chronology and of the building history of the stone church depend on reconstruction from the hagiographic and chronicle notices rather than on a single explicit dated entry. The general framework — a translation under Yaroslav’s sons in 1072 and a translation under Monomakh into the stone church in 1115 — is not in serious dispute; particular dates internal to the building and translation sequence are less firmly fixed.]

The Later Fate of the Shrine and the Relics

Through the rest of the Kievan period the shrine at Vyshgorod flourished as the premier native sanctuary of the Rus’, drawing the veneration of princes and people and serving as the focus of the brothers’ cult (Lenhoff 1989; Franklin and Shepard 1996). The relics lay in the stone church, honored as the bones of the land’s first saints, and the brothers were invoked as patrons of the dynasty and protectors in war (see The Martyrs as Protectors).

What became of the relics after the Kievan period is, however, uncertain. The Mongol sack of Kiev in 1240, and the devastation of the Kievan region in the same campaign, fell upon Vyshgorod with the rest, and the documentary thread of the shrine and its relics grows thin thereafter (Franklin and Shepard 1996, on the Mongol conquest; see The Mongol Yoke and Muscovite Russia). The relics are not securely traceable through and after the catastrophe of 1240, and their ultimate fate is not established by the sources.

[Disputed: the fate of the relics of Boris and Gleb after the Mongol sack of Kiev (1240) is not securely documented. The shrine at Vyshgorod flourished through the Kievan period (Lenhoff 1989; Franklin and Shepard 1996), but the relics cannot be traced with confidence through the destruction of the Kievan region in 1240 and after; the documentary record of the physical relics effectively fails at that point. Various later traditions and assertions about the survival, loss, or dispersal of the relics exist, but none rests on continuous and reliable attestation, and the honest position is that the post-Mongol fate of the relics is unknown. What endured beyond 1240 with certainty is the cult — the feast, the offices, the iconography, and the church dedications (see Iconography and Churches) — which spread far beyond Vyshgorod and outlived its original shrine.]

What the Shrine Establishes

For the collection, Vyshgorod fixes the material and institutional core of the cult. The two brothers were gathered into a single resting place at the church of St. Basil; the tradition held their relics incorrupt and wonder-working; a succession of churches, culminating in the great stone church, rose over them; and the relics were solemnly translated — in 1072 under Yaroslav’s sons and the metropolitan Georgi, and in 1115 under Vladimir Monomakh — in ceremonies that marked the cult’s rise to the center of Rus’ religious life. The shrine flourished through the Kievan period; its relics did not survive the documentary record past the Mongol catastrophe of 1240, but the cult it had nurtured spread across the Rus’ lands in icons and dedications that long outlasted the shrine itself.

References

Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (Vyshgorod as a princely town; the burial of the brothers; the translation of relics s.a. 1072, with the sons of Yaroslav — Iziaslav, Sviatoslav, Vsevolod — and the metropolitan Georgi.)
Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie, the Skazanie o chudesakh / miracle collection, and Nestor’s Chtenie: the burial at St. Basil’s, the recovery of Gleb’s body, the incorruption, the church-building, and the translation of 1115 with the dispute over the placing of the shrines.)
Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (The shrine’s beginnings at St. Basil’s; the joint cult; the church-building as an index of the cult’s status; the translation narratives; the cult’s flourishing through the Kievan period.)
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The role of incorruption and the wonders in the establishment of the cult.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (Vyshgorod’s place in the Kievan complex; the stone church and the translation of 1115 under Monomakh; the Mongol conquest of 1240.)