Relics and Cult

The material afterlife of St. Vladimir: the fate of his body and the spread of his veneration. This file follows the relics from their burial in the marble sarcophagus of the Church of the Tithes, through the Mongol destruction of that church in 1240 — which buried the tomb in rubble — to the rediscovery of relics by Metropolitan Peter Mohyla in 1635 and their dispersal as skull and hand among the great churches of Kyiv and Moscow; it notes the modern scholarly doubts about the 1635 identification, and traces the iconography and the broad spread of Vladimir’s cult across the East Slavic world.

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

The Tomb in the Church of the Tithes

Vladimir was buried, the Primary Chronicle records, in a marble sarcophagus in the Church of the Tithes — the Church of the Dormition of the Theotokos that he had himself built and endowed as the cathedral of Christian Kyiv (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; see Building the Church). His wife Anna, who had died a few years before him (c. 1011), was buried there too. For the baptizer of Rus’ to rest in the first great church of the Rus’ was wholly fitting: the founder lay in his foundation. Yet the absence of a strong early tradition of miracles or incorruption at this tomb is part of why his formal veneration was so slow to form (see The New Constantine). The tomb was honored, but it was not, in the early centuries, the wonder-working shrine that Boris and Gleb’s relics at Vyshgorod had become.

The Mongol Destruction of 1240

The Church of the Tithes, and Vladimir’s tomb within it, perished in the catastrophe that ended the Kievan age. In 1240 the Mongol armies of Batu Khan stormed and sacked Kyiv; the Church of the Tithes, crowded with refugees, collapsed under the assault (the tradition holds that the press of people on the vaults, or the Mongol siege-engines, brought the roof down), and the great cathedral was destroyed (Encyclopedia of Ukraine, “Church of the Tithes”). Vladimir’s marble sarcophagus, with the tombs of the early Christian princes, was buried in the rubble, and the site lay ruined for centuries. The destruction of his church and the burial of his tomb removed the natural focus that a saint’s cult ordinarily gathered around, and helped ensure that Vladimir’s veneration would grow up apart from any single great shrine of his relics.

Peter Mohyla’s Rediscovery, 1635

The relics re-entered the story in the seventeenth century. In 1635, Metropolitan Peter Mohyla (Petro Mohyla) of Kyiv — the great reformer of the Kievan Church — undertook excavations of the ruined site of the Church of the Tithes, and identified one of the sarcophagi found there as Vladimir’s. The remains recovered were fragmentary: by the accounts, a skull, a jawbone, and the bones of a hand, together with decayed traces of burial. Mohyla had the relics divided and distributed among the great churches: the skull was placed eventually in the Dormition (Assumption) Cathedral of the Kiev Caves Lavra; portions, including the right hand, went to the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Kyiv; and other fragments were sent to the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow. The 1635 rediscovery gave Vladimir, belatedly, the relics that his cult had long lacked, and spread them, in the manner of relics, among the centers of the Church that honored him.

The collection reports the rediscovery with the caution the methodology requires (see methodology §3.5). [Disputed: The identification of the 1635 remains as those of St. Vladimir rests on Mohyla’s seventeenth-century judgment of a fragmentary burial in the ruined Church of the Tithes; modern scholars question whether the bones can be securely attributed to Vladimir, given the destruction of the site and the lapse of nearly four centuries. The relics are venerated as Vladimir’s; their authenticity as his cannot be established with certainty.] The twentieth-century fate of some of the dispersed relics — the Lavra skull in particular, through the upheavals of the Soviet period and the Second World War — is poorly documented and contested in the available sources, and the collection does not assert a clean account of it.

The Iconography of the Saint

In Orthodox iconography St. Vladimir is depicted as a crowned prince, robed in the regalia of a Christian sovereign, often holding a cross (the mark of the Equal-to-the-Apostles) and sometimes a model of a church or a scroll. He is frequently shown together with his grandmother St. Olga, the two of them flanking the conversion of Rus’ as its grandmother and its father, or in larger compositions of the Baptism of Rus’ presiding over the immersion of his people in the Dnieper. The icon of the Baptism of Rus’ — Vladimir on the bank, the people in the water, the priests at their prayers — became one of the defining images of East Slavic Orthodoxy, and was multiplied especially around the millennium of 1988 (see The Baptism of Rus’ in Memory).

The Spread of the Cult

From its slow beginnings, Vladimir’s cult spread to become one of the most widely kept in the East Slavic Orthodox world. Churches, monasteries, and cities were dedicated to him; his name became one of the most common Christian names among the Eastern Slavs (in its Russian form Vladimir and its Ukrainian form Volodymyr); and his feast on 15 July was kept across the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian lands. The nineteenth century raised public monuments to him — most notably the St. Vladimir monument erected at Kyiv in 1853, one of the oldest in the city, showing him with cross uplifted over the Dnieper. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries his cult became entangled with the contested national memory of the three peoples who claim him, a story told in the final section (see The Contested Memory and Scholarship). But beneath the modern contests lies the enduring fact of the cult itself: Vladimir is venerated, across all the Churches descended from his baptism, as the saint who brought them to Christ.

Vladimir in the Liturgy

The fullest and most enduring monument of Vladimir’s cult is not stone or bone but the liturgical service appointed for his feast. The Menaion service for 15 July is the place where the Church’s settled understanding of him is most concentrated, and it gathers up nearly every theme of this collection. It hails Vladimir as “Equal-to-the-Apostles” and as “a second Constantine in word and deed,” setting him beside the great Christian emperor (see The New Constantine). It dwells on the reversal at the heart of his story — the prince who had served idols brought to serve Christ, the persecutor’s hand turned to building churches. It celebrates the baptism of the Rus’ as the dawning of light upon a people who had sat in darkness, and it joins his name to his grandmother Olga’s, the two of them praised together as the enlighteners of the Rus’ land. In the hymnography Vladimir is not the political founder of a state but the spiritual father of a people — the one through whom, in the Church’s words, the Rus’ “came to know the true God.” The liturgical Vladimir is the saint the Church actually keeps: stripped of the dynastic politics and the national contests, he is simply the baptizer of his people, the prince who led the Rus’ to the font. Whatever happens to his statues and his relics, this Vladimir is renewed every year on his feast, in every church that keeps the Byzantine rite he gave his people.

Named for the Saint: Vladimir of the Far Diaspora

A measure of the cult’s reach is how far Vladimir’s patronage travelled with the Russian and Ukrainian diasporas. As the East Slavic peoples spread across the world in the modern centuries, churches and cathedrals dedicated to St. Vladimir rose far beyond the lands of the ancient Rus’ — in Western Europe, in the Americas, in the Russian and Ukrainian émigré communities that carried their Orthodoxy into exile. His feast remained a fixed point of identity for these scattered communities, a yearly remembrance of the common origin that bound them, however divided by jurisdiction and by politics, to a single Christian beginning. The saint who had founded the Church of one land became, in the diaspora, a patron of the memory of that founding, kept by peoples for whom Kyiv and the Dnieper had become a homeland of the spirit rather than a place on the map. The spread of the cult to the ends of the earth is itself a continuation of Vladimir’s work: the baptism he began in one river ran, in time, into the whole world.

See Also

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. 1015 (burial in the marble sarcophagus in the Church of the Tithes).
  • “Church of the Tithes (Desyatynna).” Encyclopedia of Ukraine (encyclopediaofukraine.com). On the destruction of the church in the Mongol sack of Kyiv (1240) and the burial of the tombs.
  • On Peter Mohyla’s 1635 rediscovery and the dispersal of the relics (skull to the Kiev Caves Lavra; hand to St. Sophia; fragments to Moscow), and the modern doubts over the identification: the OCA Lives of the Saints (oca.org) and the standard accounts of Mohyla’s excavations.
  • Holy Great Prince Vladimir, Equal of the Apostles. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 15. For the iconography, the feast, and the spread of the cult.