Feast and the First Rus Saints

Boris and Gleb are commemorated by the Russian Church on 24 July — the day of Boris’s death on the Alta, kept as the joint feast of both brothers — and on 2 May, the feast of the translation of their relics to the new stone church at Vyshgorod in 1115; Gleb’s own death-day, 5 September, is sometimes given separately in older calendars. This file sets out the liturgical commemoration and its dates, pinned to source, and treats with care the brothers’ celebrated standing as the first canonized saints of the Rus’ land — the “first-fruits” of Rus’ sanctity — distinguishing that real precedence from the looser claim that they were Rus’s “first martyrs,” which they were not in the strict sense of dying for the confession of the faith.

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

The Principal Feast: 24 July

The chief commemoration of Boris and Gleb falls on 24 July (Julian; 6 August on the civil Gregorian calendar in the modern period), and it is a joint feast of the two brothers together. The date is the day of Boris’s death, which the Russian Primary Chronicle places on the river Alta in the summer of 1015 (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953), and which the Skazanie dwells on as the central passion of the cult (the Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). That a single feast on Boris’s death-day should carry both brothers is itself a feature of the cult: from very early the two were venerated as a pair — “the holy passion-bearers Boris and Gleb,” almost a single liturgical name — rather than as two saints with two independent observances (Lenhoff 1989, on the joint character of the cult and its calendar). The pairing is so fixed in the tradition that the brothers’ icons, dedications, and prayers nearly always present them together, and the 24 July feast is the principal occasion on which the whole Russian Church keeps them.

The choice of Boris’s death-day rather than Gleb’s as the joint feast reflects the order of the narrative and of the cult’s formation: Boris is the first to die and the first to be venerated, the elder around whom the paired devotion crystallized (Lenhoff 1989; on the formation of the cult, see The Formation of the Cult). The Chronicle’s own dating of the deaths and the early establishment of the commemoration tie the feast securely to the events it remembers, even as the hagiographical detail surrounding those events remains the tradition’s, not independent history (see The Killing of Boris).

The Translation-Feast: 2 May (1115)

The second great commemoration is 2 May, kept as a feast of the translation (the solemn moving) of the brothers’ relics. The relics of Boris and Gleb were translated more than once at Vyshgorod, the town north of Kiev where they were buried and where their shrine grew up: an earlier translation under the sons of Yaroslav in 1072, and the grander translation of 1115, when the relics were moved into a newly built stone church in the presence of the assembled princes of the dynasty and the senior clergy (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1072 and 1115; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; on the shrine, see Vyshgorod). The 2 May feast in the Russian calendar corresponds to this translation tradition, and a translation-feast is a category distinct from a death-feast: it commemorates not the saint’s passing but the Church’s act of honoring the relics, the public ratification of the cult.

The relationship between the two translations and the fixing of the calendar date carries a genuine complication, and it should be stated rather than smoothed over. [Disputed: the Primary Chronicle records translations of the relics at Vyshgorod in both 1072 (under Iziaslav, Svyatoslav, and Vsevolod Yaroslavich) and 1115 (under Vladimir Monomakh and his cousins), and the May commemoration is associated in the liturgical tradition with the translation event; sources and calendars vary in which translation the 2 May feast is taken primarily to mark, and some treatments associate the date specifically with the 1115 translation into the new stone church while others fold the earlier 1072 event into the same commemoration (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, s.a. 1072 and 1115; Lenhoff 1989, on the translations and the calendar of the cult).] What is not in doubt is that the May feast is a translation-feast keyed to the honoring of the relics at Vyshgorod, and that the 1115 translation was the most magnificent of these public acts.

Gleb’s Separate Date: 5 September

Although the principal feast unites the brothers on Boris’s death-day, Gleb’s own commemoration on 5 September — the date associated with his death near Smolensk — appears separately in some calendars, especially older ones, and Gleb is in places honored on that day in addition to the joint 24 July feast (Lenhoff 1989, on the variants in the cult’s calendar; on Gleb’s death, see The Killing of Gleb). [Disputed: the tradition is not perfectly uniform on Gleb’s separate observance — the dominant and pan-Russian commemoration is the joint feast of 24 July, with the 2 May translation-feast second; a distinct 5 September commemoration of Gleb is attested in the calendar tradition but is treated in some sources as a local or secondary observance rather than a universal one (Lenhoff 1989). The honest statement is that the joint 24 July feast is primary and universal, the 2 May translation-feast is firmly established, and Gleb’s individual 5 September date is real but variable in prominence across calendars.] The persistence of a separate Gleb date is a residue of the fact that the brothers died on different days and in different places; the cult’s instinct, however, was always to bind them together, and the joint feast won out as the principal observance.

The First Canonized Saints of the Rus’ Land

The most consequential thing about Boris and Gleb in the calendar is not a date but a precedence: they were the first saints canonized by the Church of Rus’ — the first native holy ones of a Church that in 1015 was scarcely a generation old, founded by their own father’s baptism of the Rus’ in 988 (Fedotov 1946; Franklin and Shepard 1996, on the significance of a young Church producing its own saints; on the conversion, see The Russian Orthodox Tradition). A newly converted people ordinarily venerates the saints of the older Churches that brought it the faith; for the Rus’ to raise two of its own princes to the altars, within decades of its baptism, was an act of remarkable self-assertion, and it gave the young Church a holiness rooted in its own soil and dynasty rather than borrowed from Byzantium (Franklin and Shepard 1996; Fedotov 1946). In this precise sense the brothers are rightly called the first-fruits (pervotsvet, the “first flowering”) of Rus’ sanctity, and the tradition’s affection for that image is well founded.

This precedence must be stated carefully, because the looser popular formula — that Boris and Gleb were the “first martyrs of Rus’” — is not strictly accurate, and the careful sources do not endorse it without qualification. Boris and Gleb did not die for confessing Christ before persecutors; they died in a dynastic struggle, killed by fellow Christians of their own house. The tradition itself recognizes this and classes them not as muchenniki (martyrs in the strict sense, witnesses unto death for the faith) but as strastoterptsy, “passion-bearers” — those who accept unjust, violent death in voluntary, Christ-like non-resistance, even when that death is not inflicted for the faith as such (Fedotov 1946, on the distinction between the martyr and the passion-bearer; see A New Category of Sanctity). The brothers are thus the first canonized saints of Rus’, and the founders of the passion-bearer category, but not “protomartyrs” in the technical sense the word carries in the older Churches.

The precedence is further qualified by the question of who, if anyone, died for the faith in Rus’ before them. [Disputed: the tradition remembers earlier Christian deaths on Rus’ soil — most notably the two Varangian martyrs of Kiev, a father and son killed by a pagan mob under Vladimir before his conversion, whom the Primary Chronicle recounts (s.a. 983; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953) and whom later tradition honors as the “first martyrs of Rus’” in the strict confessional sense. On this reckoning Boris and Gleb are the first canonized and the first native princely saints, and the first-fruits of the organized cult, but not the first Christians to die violently on Rus’ soil, and not the first whom tradition calls martyrs for the faith (Fedotov 1946; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The cleanest formulation, which the scholarship supports, is that Boris and Gleb are the first formally canonized saints of the Rus’ Church and the founders of the passion-bearer category — claims that are exact — while “first martyrs of Rus’” is a popular shorthand that the Varangian-martyr tradition and the strastoterptsy distinction both complicate.] Holding to the exact claim costs the brothers nothing: being the first canonized saints of a whole people, and the source of a new category of holiness, is precedence enough.

The Liturgical Texts: Service, Troparion, Kontakion

The cult of Boris and Gleb generated, very early, a body of liturgical poetry that is among the oldest original literature of the Slavonic Church — not translated from the Greek but composed in Rus’ for these native saints. A full liturgical service (the offices for their feast) took shape around the cult, and within it the hymnographic forms proper to a saint’s commemoration: the troparion (the short hymn stating the feast’s theme) and the kontakion (the brief poetic stanza summarizing the saint’s significance), together with the canon and stichera of the office (Lenhoff 1989, on the liturgical and literary production of the cult; Fedotov 1946, on the hymnography as a witness to the passion-bearer theology). These texts are a primary witness to how the Church understood the brothers: they praise Boris and Gleb precisely for their voluntary, non-resisting acceptance of death in imitation of Christ, and they pray to them as intercessors and as protectors of the Rus’ land and its princes (Fedotov 1946; on the protective role, see The Martyrs as Protectors).

Because the manuscript and editorial history of these offices is intricate and the present file does not turn on the exact wording of any one stanza, the liturgical texts are cited here generically — as the service, troparion, and kontakion of the joint feast in the Russian liturgical tradition — rather than by a quoted incipit or a specific service-book edition. The substance that matters for this guide is secure and well attested: the brothers are hymned as strastoterptsy, their non-resistance is the explicit ground of their praise, and the hymnography is among the earliest original Slavonic compositions of the Rus’ Church (Fedotov 1946; Lenhoff 1989).

Their Place in the Calendar, in Rus’ and Beyond

Within the Russian Church the feast of Boris and Gleb is a settled and beloved commemoration, and their names are among the most widely borne and most frequently dedicated in the East Slavic world — churches, monasteries, and towns carry their names from the Kievan period onward (Lenhoff 1989, on the dedications and the diffusion of the cult; on churches, see Vyshgorod). Their veneration spread with the East Slavic Churches into the lands that became Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and it is kept across the jurisdictions of the Russian tradition today.

Beyond the Slavic world the cult is less prominent but not unknown: the brothers are commemorated in the broader Orthodox calendar as saints of the universal Church, though the depth of their veneration remains, as it began, distinctively Rus’. There is also an early notice of Western recognition — a dedication and liturgical remembrance associated with Boris and Gleb in Bohemia and the Latin sphere in the medieval period — but the texture of that Western cult is thin and is best left as a marginal note rather than pressed into a claim of wide Latin veneration (Lenhoff 1989, on the limited diffusion outside the East Slavic lands). The center of gravity of the cult was, and remains, the Russian Church, for which Boris and Gleb are the first saints of its own and the founders of a holiness it came to regard as peculiarly its own — the legacy traced in the next file (see Legacy in Russian Spirituality).

References

Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (Boris’s death s.a. 1015; the translations of the relics s.a. 1072 and 1115; the Varangian martyrs s.a. 983.)
Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie on the deaths and the passion.)
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The distinction between martyr and passion-bearer; the hymnography and its theology; the brothers as first-fruits of Rus’ sanctity.)
Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (The joint character of the cult and its calendar; the translations; the liturgical and literary production; the dedications and diffusion.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The significance of a young Church producing and canonizing its own native saints.)