Boris and Gleb

Origins and early life

Boris and Gleb were among the younger sons of Vladimir Svyatoslavich, Grand Prince of Kiev, who received baptism for himself and his people about 988. They were therefore born into a house that was Christian only in its first generation, and were, in the words of the tradition, "the good fruit of an evil root" — children of the polygamous prince of the old religion who had become the apostle of the new. At baptism Boris was given the name Roman, and Gleb the name David; the hymnography and the liturgical books commonly address them by these baptismal names, and the pairing "Roman and David" in a service book or an icon inscription always means these two brothers.

Vladimir set his sons over the towns of his realm. Boris received Rostov, in the north-eastern forests, and Gleb received Murom on the Oka. Both are remembered as educated in the Scriptures and given to almsgiving and to the reading of the lives of the saints; the Tale says that Boris read the passions and martyrdoms of the holy martyrs and prayed with tears that God would grant him to suffer as they had — a prayer the hagiographer sets at the head of his narrative because it was so terribly answered. Boris was the father's favourite, and in his last years Vladimir kept him near him at Kiev; it was Boris whom the aged prince sent out with the household army against the Pechenegs in the summer of 1015.

The murder of Boris

Vladimir died on 15 July 1015 at Berestovo, near Kiev. His eldest surviving son, Svyatopolk — reckoned in the Chronicle a son "of two fathers," born of the Greek widow of Vladimir's brother Yaropolk and so of doubtful legitimacy — was at hand, and seized the city, distributing gifts to the men of Kiev to buy their allegiance. Boris was on the river Alta near Pereyaslavl with the army, having found no Pechenegs to fight, when messengers brought him word that his father was dead and that his brother held Kiev.

His retinue, the druzhina of Vladimir himself, urged him to march on the capital: the army was his, the city would open to him. Boris refused. "I will not lift my hand against my elder brother," he answered; "let him be to me in the place of a father." The soldiers left him and went over to Svyatopolk; Boris remained in his tent with a few servants, having been warned that men were coming to kill him. He spent the night in prayer, sang the office of matins and the psalter, read the passion of Christ and the passions of the martyrs, wept for his father and for his brother's soul, and prayed before an icon of Christ that he might be granted to suffer without hatred.

At dawn the men sent from Vyshgorod — Putsha and the boyars Talets, Elovit and Lyashko — came upon the tent and thrust their spears through its walls. A young Hungarian servant, George Ugrin, threw himself upon his master's body and was killed with him; the murderers cut off his head to get at the golden torque Boris had given him. Boris, still breathing, was carried out wrapped in the tent-cloth and set in a cart, and two Varangians whom Svyatopolk sent to make an end ran him through the heart. It was 24 July 1015. His body was brought secretly to Vyshgorod, the fortified town above Kiev, and buried by the wall of the wooden church of St Basil the Great — the church of Vladimir's own patron.

The murder of Gleb

Gleb was at Murom, far away, and knew nothing. Svyatopolk sent him a lying message that their father was ill and called for him. Gleb rode out with a small company; on the way, near Smolensk, a warning from his brother Yaroslav at Novgorod overtook him — their father was dead and Boris murdered. He wept aloud for both, and would neither turn back nor arm himself. At the mouth of the little river Smyadyn, where his boat lay off Smolensk, the men sent by Svyatopolk under Goryaser came alongside. Gleb greeted them, and asked only to be spared for his youth; then, seeing they were resolved, he prayed for his murderers and for his brother. His own cook, a Torkin (a man of the Turkic Torks) named in the sources Torchin, cut his throat with the kitchen knife. It was 5 September 1015. His body was left in the wilderness between two hollowed logs; hunters and passers-by afterwards saw a pillar of light and burning candles over the place, and heard singing, and so it was found. Yaroslav, when he had taken Kiev, had the relics brought to Vyshgorod and laid beside those of Boris.

A third brother, Svyatoslav of the Drevlyane, was hunted down and killed in the same season; he is not numbered among the passion-bearers, the Church having glorified those two whose deaths the sources describe as freely and consciously accepted.

The war that followed lasted four years. Yaroslav, later called the Wise, broke Svyatopolk at Lyubech (1016), lost Kiev to him again when he returned with Polish help (1018), and destroyed him at last on the Alta in 1019 — the Chronicle notes with awe that the field was the very place of Boris's murder. Svyatopolk fled westward and died, the Chronicle says, "in a waste place between the Poles and the Czechs"; the chronicler compares him to Cain and to Lamech, and the epithet he bears in Russian memory is Okayanny, "the Accursed."

Relics and translations

The tomb at Vyshgorod became the first great shrine of Rus'. Healings began — the lame and the blind, a woman with a withered hand, a man delivered in prison — and were gathered into a written Account of the Miracles that grew by stages through the eleventh century and into the twelfth. Yaroslav built a five-domed church over the graves, consecrated on 24 July 1026, into which Metropolitan John I of Kiev solemnly received the relics; a special chapel afterwards housed them. The rebuilt church became the family sanctuary of the Yaroslavichi, a standing monument to the brotherly love their uncles had died for, and the tradition dates the first keeping of a May 2 commemoration of the transfer to 1069, on Izyaslav's return to Kiev.

In 1072 the three sons of Yaroslav — Izyaslav, then Grand Prince, with Svyatoslav and Vsevolod — together with Metropolitan George of Kiev translated the relics into their new shrine; the Chronicle dates this translation to 20 May. Their descendants then vied piously in adorning the tombs, and Oleg Svyatoslavich built a great stone church at Vyshgorod, finished in 1111. On 2 May 1115, the Sunday of the Myrrhbearing Women, the relics were carried into it in the most solemn of the translations — "all the hierarchs, igumens, monks and priests came, filling the whole town," Vladimir Monomakh accompanying Boris with the metropolitan while David Svyatoslavich and the bishops bore Gleb. It is to this translation, and to the commemoration begun in 1069, that the feast of May 2 is referred.

The shrine was among the wealthiest in Rus', and princes came to it before campaigns. The relics disappeared in the catastrophe of the Mongol sack of 1240, and their fate is unknown; the church was destroyed. Portions had already travelled: particles are recorded as given in 1095 to the Slavonic-rite monastery of Sázava in Bohemia — the same house through which the cult of Wenceslaus of Bohemia had passed into Rus' — and set in one of its altars.

Veneration and later cultus

Veneration was immediate and, unusually, popular before it was official. Metropolitan John I of Kiev (c. 1008–1035), a Greek, is credited with composing the first service to them. The Account of the Miracles preserves the memory that a later Greek metropolitan — George, the same who presided at the 1072 translation — was at first "not firm in faith" toward these new and unmartyred saints, and was convinced only by the incorrupt bodies and the cures: a rare and candid record of Byzantine hesitation before a category of sanctity the Slavs had produced for themselves.

Once accepted, the two brothers became the household saints of the princely house and then of the whole land. Churches and monasteries called Borisoglebsky were founded from Kiev to Rostov, Turov, Chernigov, Novgorod, Smolensk and Moscow — several of them appear elsewhere in this collection as the houses of later saints, among them the Borisoglebsky monastery near Rostov of Irenarchus of Rostov, the monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb at Turov where Cyril of Turov was tonsured, the cathedral of Saints Boris and Gleb at Chernigov, and the Moscow church of the two princes where Maximus of Moscow was buried. They were invoked as defenders of the land in war: the vision granted before the battle of the Neva in 1240, in which the two passion-bearers were seen going to the help of their kinsman, belongs to the tradition of Alexander Nevsky, and later princes claimed their aid against the Horde.

The ideal of non-resistance

The theological interest of Boris and Gleb lies in what they were not. They were not put to death for confessing Christ before idolaters; they were killed in a dynastic murder, and the Church honoured them for the manner of their dying. The Slavic term coined or fixed for them, strastoterpets — "passion-bearer," one who bears the passion — names an imitation of Christ's own voluntary and unresisting suffering: the innocent victim who will not defend himself, who forgives his killer, and who refuses to purchase his life by shedding a brother's blood. The hagiographers grasped the novelty and reached for the one precedent they knew, the murdered Czech prince Wenceslaus, whom the Lives name explicitly as the pattern.

Two consequences followed for the culture of Rus'. First, a political theology: the sanctity of seniority and the sinfulness of fratricidal war, preached over the graves of its victims in a land whose princes would spend three centuries in exactly such wars. Second, a permanent type of holiness: the line of the passion-bearers runs from Boris and Gleb through Michael and Theodore of Chernigov and the murdered princes of the appanage age down to the last imperial family. The type also has a western cousin in Edward the Martyr of England, killed in the same generation and for the same kind of reason.

Hagiographic and literary legacy

Three eleventh- and early twelfth-century works make up what Russian scholarship calls the Borisoglebsky cycle, and together they are the beginning of literature in Rus':

1. The Chronicle tale — the narrative under the year 1015 in the Russian Primary Chronicle, the Tale of Bygone Years, sober, dated, and heavy with biblical parallel.
2. The anonymous Tale, Passion and Encomium of the Holy Martyrs Boris and Gleb (Skazanie i strastoterpchestvo i pokhvala), the fullest and most moving account, rich in the brothers' interior monologues and prayers, and traditionally attributed to a monk Jacob (Iakov Chernorizets); to it is appended the Account of the Miracles, compiled in layers and carried down to the translation of 1115.
3. Nestor's Lesson on the Life and Murder of the Blessed Passion-Bearers Boris and Gleb (Chtenie), by Nestor the Chronicler of the Kiev Caves, written in the 1080s in a more rhetorical, Byzantine-monastic manner, and occasioned by the translation of 1072.

To these should be added the liturgical office, the paremii (Old Testament readings proper to their feasts — themselves a rarity for non-biblical saints), and a great body of later sermons and encomia.