LIVES OF THE SAINTS

Giving thy mind wings with the knowledge of God, thou didst soar beyond visible creatures.

Apolytikion of St. Olga

St. Olga of Kiev

Olga ruled Kiev in the tenth century, in the harsh first generation of the Rus, and her road to sainthood ran straight through everything that age made of a woman left in power. She was the widow of Igor, the Great Prince of Kiev, and when he was killed she held the throne for her young son and governed in her own right, with a competence the chroniclers admired and a ferocity they did not hide; the same chronicles that praise her wisdom also remember the terrible vengeance she took on the tribe that had murdered her husband. She was, before her conversion, a formidable and frightening ruler.

Then she became a Christian, and the change was real enough to reach down the generations. Tradition holds that she traveled to Constantinople, the great Christian city to the south, to be baptized, and that the Emperor himself, struck by her bearing, proposed marriage. Olga, as shrewd in faith as in statecraft, asked him first to stand as her godfather at the font; once he had, she pointed out that he could hardly now marry his own goddaughter, for the Church does not allow it. Gracefully beaten at his own game, the Emperor sent her home with priests and holy books and icons. At baptism she took the name Helen, after the mother of Constantine, and for her labor to bring the faith to her people the Church gave her the title Equal-to-the-Apostles, the same it gives to Constantine and Helen themselves.

Her own son Svyatoslav would not follow her into the faith; he remained a pagan warrior to the end, and Olga knew the grief of a believing mother whose grown child turns away. But she had planted a seed she would not live to see flower. The grandson she helped raise was Vladimir, and it was Vladimir who, a generation after her death, would lead the whole of the Rus into the Church and baptize a nation. Olga reposed in peace in the year 969, and the Church remembers her on July 11.

In the icon she is shown crowned, a princess, often holding a church in one hand or a cross, the grandmother of Russian Christianity. She is a patron of widows and of converts, and of every believer praying for a child or grandchild who has wandered off, the proof that a faith planted in one heart can lie a generation in the ground and still bring in a harvest no one alive had dared expect.