Building the Church

The material works of Vladimir’s Christian reign: the churches he raised over the land of Rus’. This file treats the first foundations — the wooden Church of St. Basil set on the very hill where the idols and the human sacrifice of 983 had stood — and, above all, the great Church of the Tithes (Desyatinnaya), Kyiv’s first stone church, dedicated to the Dormition of the Theotokos, endowed with a tithe of the prince’s revenue, entrusted to Anastasius of Cherson, and made the resting-place of the relics of St. Clement of Rome brought from the Crimean campaign. These were the visible foundations of the institutional Church that Section 06 describes.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Equal-to-the-Apostles)

The Visible Work of Conversion

If the wagons of bread and the abolished wergild were the inward signs of Vladimir’s conversion, the churches were its outward and lasting monument. A converted prince in the early medieval world showed his faith above all by building — by raising, out of his own treasure, the houses of the new God on the sites of the old gods, and by endowing them so that the worship could continue after him. Vladimir’s church-building is, moreover, the most archaeologically grounded part of his reign: where the Chronicle’s portrait of his charity must be taken on the source’s word, the foundations of his great church were dug out of the Kyivan earth and can be seen. The collection treats the building program as both a religious act and a documented historical one.

The Church of St. Basil on the Hill

The first church the Chronicle records is a wooden Church of St. Basil, raised on the hill outside Vladimir’s hall where the idols had stood — the very place where Perun had received the people’s worship and where, in 983, the two Varangian Christians had been killed (see The Pagan Prince). The dedication was fitting on every level: St. Basil the Great was the patron of Vladimir’s own baptismal name (see Korsun and Anna), and to set his church on the hill of the toppled idols was to make in stone and timber the same statement the toppling of Perun had made — that the place of demons had become the place of God. The Chronicle’s geography is exact and deliberate: the church rises where the old religion had been densest, and its raising completes the inversion that the destruction of the idols began.

The Church of the Tithes

The great monument of Vladimir’s reign, however, was the Church of the Tithes — the Desyatinnaya tserkov’, dedicated to the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos — Kyiv’s first stone church and the cathedral of the new Christian capital. Built between about 989 and 996 by craftsmen brought from Byzantium, it was the largest and most splendid building in the Rus’ land, a stone church on the Byzantine model rising over a city that had until lately known only timber. It would serve as Kyiv’s principal cathedral until the building of St. Sophia under Vladimir’s son Yaroslav the Wise in 1037.

Its name records Vladimir’s endowment of it. The Chronicle preserves his dedication: upon seeing the church completed, Vladimir prayed and declared, “I bestow upon this church of the Holy Virgin a tithe of my property and of my cities” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 996) — a tenth of the prince’s revenues, settled permanently upon the church, from which it took the name “of the Tithes.” The endowment was the institutional guarantee of the new Church’s life: not a single act of building but a perpetual stream of support, binding the wealth of the state to the worship of God. Vladimir entrusted the church to Anastasius of Cherson — the same man whose arrow, in the Chronicle’s narrative, had betrayed the water-pipes of Cherson and so delivered the city (see Korsun and Anna) — who became its first head and a leading figure of the early Rus’ Church.

The Relics of St. Clement

The Church of the Tithes was also made a great reliquary. From the Crimean campaign Vladimir had brought back the relics of St. Clement of Rome — the first-century Bishop of Rome, traditionally martyred in the Crimea near Cherson, whose relics had been recovered there in the ninth century by Saints Cyril and Methodius themselves — together with relics of Clement’s disciple. These Vladimir deposited in the Church of the Tithes, making St. Clement an early patron of the Rus’ Church and binding the new Christianity of Kyiv to one of the most ancient figures of the universal Church (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 988–996; Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, 1996). The connection is rich with meaning: the relics carried from Cherson by Cyril and Methodius, the apostles of the Slavs, now rested in the first cathedral of the Slavs’ newest Christian people — the Cyrillo-Methodian inheritance made tangible in the bones of a Roman martyr at Kyiv (see The Church of Rus).

The First Clergy and the Spread of Churches

Around these foundations gathered the first clergy of the Rus’ Church. Priests came from Cherson — Anastasius and his companions — and from Christian Bulgaria, bringing with them the Church Slavonic liturgy and books that would shape the entire character of Rus’ Christianity (see The Church of Rus). The Chronicle and the later tradition credit Vladimir with building churches more widely through his cities and setting priests over them, so that the worship begun at Kyiv might spread through the land. The church-building was thus the material engine of the slow Christianization (see Christianizing the Land): each church a center from which the new faith could radiate into the surrounding country, each priest a teacher of a population only beginning to be Christian.

The Foundations of a Church

A Church on the Byzantine Model

The architecture itself carried meaning. The Church of the Tithes was built by craftsmen brought from Byzantium, on the Byzantine plan — a cross-in-square stone church with domes, ornamented with marble, mosaic, and fresco in the imperial manner. To a city that had known only timber building and the open-air sanctuaries of the old gods, such a church was an astonishment: a piece of Byzantium itself, set down on the Kyivan hill, declaring in stone that the Rus’ had joined the civilization of the Christian empire. The excavated foundations confirm its scale and its Byzantine character, and confirm that Vladimir spared no expense; this was meant to be the equal of the great churches of the Christian world, the visible token of Rus’ entry into the Byzantine Commonwealth (see Why Byzantium). The building was a statement of identity as much as a place of worship: it said that Kyiv was now a Christian capital on the Byzantine pattern, and that its prince was a Christian sovereign in the company of Constantinople. The pattern it set — the great stone cathedral as the heart of the Christian city — would be repeated and surpassed by Vladimir’s son Yaroslav in the Cathedral of St. Sophia, and would shape the sacred architecture of the East Slavic lands for centuries.

The Foundations of a Church

Vladimir’s building program laid, quite literally, the foundations of the Rus’ Church. The Church of St. Basil on the hill of the idols proclaimed the defeat of the old religion; the Church of the Tithes, with its perpetual endowment, its head from Cherson, and its relics of an ancient martyr, gave the new religion a cathedral, an institutional support, and a place in the universal Church. These were not merely buildings; they were the instruments by which a one-day baptism in the Dnieper could become the permanent religion of a people. When the Mongols destroyed the Church of the Tithes in 1240, burying Vladimir’s own tomb in its rubble (see Relics and Cult), they destroyed the first and greatest monument of his Christian reign — but by then the Church it had founded had long outgrown its walls.

See Also

  • The Church of Rus — the institutional Church these foundations supported
  • The Pagan Prince — the hill of the idols and the 983 sacrifice on which the Church of St. Basil rose
  • Korsun and Anna — Anastasius of Cherson and the Crimean origin of the Clement relics
  • The Change of Life — the inward transformation that the church-building outwardly expressed
  • Relics and Cult — the Church of the Tithes as Vladimir’s burial place and its destruction in 1240

References

  • The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. Entry s.a. 988–996 (the Church of St. Basil on the hill; the Church of the Tithes; the dedication “I bestow upon this church of the Holy Virgin a tithe of my property and of my cities”; Anastasius of Cherson; the relics of St. Clement).
  • Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. On the Church of the Tithes, the Byzantine builders, and the Clement relics.
  • “Church of the Tithes (Desyatynna).” Encyclopedia of Ukraine (encyclopediaofukraine.com). On the building (c. 989–996), the Dormition dedication, the tithe endowment, and the destruction by the Mongols in 1240.
  • Holy Great Prince Vladimir, Equal of the Apostles. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 15. For the church-building and the first clergy from Cherson and Bulgaria.