Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The legend about the visit of the Apostle Andrew to the hills of the future city of Kiev was unknown in Russia before the sixteenth century. Russia, however, shared with all the South Slav Christians the cult of St Clement of Rome as the favourite saint; it was a cult that spread out from Cherson on the Black Sea, the place where he was said to have been exiled under the Emperor Trajan (r. 98–117) and where his relics were deposed. Cherson became a centre of Christianity under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, whose tradition of Byzantine Christianity was influential throughout the Caucasus and Black Sea region. According to the Byzantine sources, there was only one Baptism of Rus, which took place in the 860s under the Patriarch Photius of Constantinople, and the Prince of Kiev, Askold (between 860 and 867, most probably in 860–1). However, the Russian ruling elite after Askold remained pagan till the second and more important Baptism of Rus in 988, which nevertheless passed unnoticed by the Byzantines. This baptism, in 988, of the Grand Prince Vladimir and the people under his rule was preceded by that of his grandmother Olga, most probably in Constantinople, in 957. Both Vladimir and Olga were glorified in the Russian Church as ‘equal to the apostles’, figures parallel to Constantine the Great and his mother Helena. Vladimir brought from Cherson a bishop (or, at least, a de ... log in or subscribe to read full text