Saint Olga of Kyiv

Saint Olga was a princess of Kyiv and the wife of Prince Igor, and after his death she ruled the Kyivan state on behalf of her son. She was the first of the Rurikid dynasty to receive baptism, taking the name Helena. The Roman Martyrology calls her the grandmother of Saint Vladimir and says that she prepared the way to Christ for all the people of Rus’. The Church commemorates her on July 11.

It is not known where she came from or when she was born. A later tradition links her to the region of Pskov and gives the year 890, but this date cannot be confirmed. With Igor she had a son, Sviatoslav. Around 945 Igor was killed by the Drevlians, a tribe that had risen against the rule of Kyiv, and Olga took over the government because her son was still a child.

An old chronicle of Rus’, known as the Primary Chronicle, tells how Olga took bloody revenge on the Drevlians for her husband’s death. This happened in the years when she was still a pagan. As ruler she strengthened the authority of Kyiv over its subject lands and kept up good relations with the Byzantine Empire.

Around 955, as John Paul II wrote, Olga was baptized freely and publicly, and afterward she remained faithful to her baptismal promises. According to the chronicle she was baptized in Constantinople; some historians, however, believe that it took place in Kyiv, before her journey to the imperial capital in 957. Tradition holds that Patriarch Polyeuctus greeted her there with the words: “Blessed are you among the women of Rus’, for you have loved the light and driven away the darkness.”

Olga wished her people to embrace the faith as well, but she could not persuade her son, who remained a pagan. In 959 she asked Otto I for a bishop and priests for Rus’. In 961 the monk Adalbert of Trier, later archbishop of Magdeburg, arrived in Kyiv as bishop, but persistent paganism kept him from carrying out his mission, and he soon left. John Paul II saw in this a sign that the young Church in Kyiv was then helped by the still undivided Church of the East and the West.

Olga died in Kyiv on July 11, 969. Her work was taken up by her grandson Vladimir, who in 988 led Rus’ to baptism. He moved his grandmother’s remains to the Church of the Tithes, which he had built in Kyiv. John Paul II wrote that Vladimir built on her decision and gave her work a lasting form.

Olga has been venerated in Rus’ since the Middle Ages, long before canonization processes came into being, and the Eastern tradition calls her equal to the apostles. Pius XII, in a letter to the Greek Catholic bishops for the millennium of her baptism, held her up together with Vladimir as an example for the faithful. John Paul II recalled her in the apostolic letter Euntes in mundum, issued in 1988 for the millennium of the baptism of Kyivan Rus’.