09 — Veneration and Legacy
The liturgical commemoration of Boris and Gleb and their standing as the first canonized saints of the Rus’ land, together with the long afterlife of the passion-bearer ideal they founded — a distinctively Russian form of holiness that runs through nine centuries of Russian spirituality and was invoked again, explicitly, in the twentieth-century glorification of the last Romanovs. These files set out the feast and the calendar with their dates pinned to source, and trace the legacy soberly, distinguishing what the tradition claims from what the historical record will bear.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Passion-Bearers; first canonized Rus saints)
Boris and Gleb were not the first Christians of the Rus’ to die, but they were the first whom the Church of Rus’ raised to its altars — the first native saints of a Church barely a generation old. Their cult fixed a feast in the calendar, generated one of the earliest bodies of original Slavonic liturgical poetry, and, more durably than either, established the strastoterptsy or “passion-bearers” as a category of sanctity that later Russian piety would treat as peculiarly its own. This section covers the commemoration itself — the principal feast of 24 July and the translation-feast of 2 May, and the careful claim that the brothers are the “first-fruits” of Rus’ holiness — and then the legacy, from George Fedotov’s thesis that kenotic non-resistance became a paradigm of Russian holiness down to the contested invocation of the Boris-and-Gleb category in the year-2000 glorification of Tsar Nicholas II and his family as tsarstvennye strastoterptsy, “the royal passion-bearers.”
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Feast and the First Rus Saints | The liturgical commemoration — the principal feast of 24 July (Boris’s death and the joint feast), the translation-feast of 2 May (1115), and Gleb’s separate 5 September in older calendars; the brothers’ status as the first canonized Rus’ saints and “first-fruits” of Rus’ sanctity, with the precise caveat that they are passion-bearers rather than martyrs for the faith; the service, troparion, and kontakion tradition. |
| Legacy in Russian Spirituality | The long afterlife of the passion-bearer model — Fedotov’s kenotic thesis, its echoes through Russian history, and the explicit, debated invocation of the Boris-and-Gleb category in the glorifications of the last Romanovs (ROCOR 1981; Moscow Patriarchate 2000, precisely as strastoterptsy), handled even-handedly. |
See Also
- The Killing of Boris — the death that the principal feast of 24 July commemorates
- A New Category of Sanctity — the passion-bearer ideal whose legacy this section traces
- The Formation of the Cult — how the veneration commemorated here first arose under Yaroslav
- Vyshgorod — the shrine whose translations the 2 May feast remembers
- The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia — the twentieth-century saints in whom the passion-bearer model was invoked again
References
- Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953.
- Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
- Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946.
- Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989.
- Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996.