Gleb of Vladimir
The Holy and Right-believing Prince Gleb Andreevich of Vladimir
Prince · Righteous · b. c. 1155 — d. 1174
Commemorated 20 June — Repose at Vladimir
Gleb Andreevich (c. 1155–1174), baptised George, was the younger son of the Grand Prince Andrew Bogolyubsky of Vladimir. He is one of the very few saints of the Russian calendar honoured for nothing but his piety: he held no throne, fought no battle, founded nothing, and died at nineteen. From the age of twelve he lived, in the phrase of his Life, "a solitary spiritual life" in his father's house — fasting, keeping vigil, reading the Scriptures, honouring the clergy and giving away what he had. His body was found incorrupt and lay in the Dormition cathedral of Vladimir, where it survived the burning of the church in the Tatar sack of 1238 untouched by the fire; he was glorified in 1702 and is honoured as a protector of the city of Vladimir.
Son of Andrew Bogolyubsky
Gleb was born about 1155, the younger son of Andrew Yurievich Bogolyubsky, Prince of Vladimir and Suzdal — the ruler who moved the centre of gravity of the Russian lands from Kiev to the north-east, brought the icon of the Mother of God from Vyshgorod to Vladimir (the Vladimir Icon), built the Dormition cathedral and the church on the Nerl, and was murdered by his own boyars at Bogolyubovo in 1174. His baptismal name was George (Georgy), after his grandfather Yuri Dolgoruky; Gleb was the princely name, borne in honour of the passion-bearer.
The house he grew up in was, for all its violence and ambition, a devout one, and the Life attributes his formation to his parents' example. From the age of twelve he had chosen his own manner of life. He read the sacred books continually, honoured the clergy, gave alms without stint, and — the Life is explicit that this was extraordinary in one so young — took upon himself "the exploit of strict fasting and prayerful vigilance," the discipline of a monk kept in a prince's chamber.
Repose
He died in 1174, aged nineteen, and was buried in the Dormition cathedral of Vladimir, the church his father had built. The chronicles say nothing of the cause. His death fell in the same year as his father's murder — Andrew was killed on the night of 28–29 June 1174 — and the Life of the son is silent about the catastrophe that overtook the family within days of his burial.
The incorrupt relics and the fire of 1238
The body was found incorrupt, and the tomb in the cathedral became a place of prayer. Two events fixed its reputation.
In 1238 the armies of Batu Khan took Vladimir and set fire to the Dormition cathedral, in which a great part of the population, and the bishop and the princely family, had taken refuge; they perished in the fire, and the church was gutted. The tradition records that the fire did not touch the tomb of Gleb.
In 1410, in the raid of the Tatars under Talych, the city was plundered and the cathedral rifled; men broke into the crypt in search of treasure, and — the account says — flame shot out of it, and the raiders fled the city in terror. The story is preserved with the account of the sacristan Patrikey, tortured to death in the same raid for refusing to reveal where the cathedral's treasures were hidden.
Glorification
Local veneration at the tomb was old, but the formal act came late. In 1702 the relics were examined and found whole, the glorification was proclaimed, and a service and a Life were composed for the new saint. A chapel over the relics was built in 1774. He is honoured as a particular protector of the city of Vladimir, to whose deliverances in the Tatar and later invasions his intercession is ascribed, and he is numbered in the synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir.
Feast and commemoration
June 20 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 3). A Russian commemoration, kept by the Moscow Patriarchate and the OCA and absent from the Greek books. He is commemorated also in the synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir, and at Vladimir itself his memory is joined to that of the cathedral in which he lay.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a right-believing prince)
From thy youth thou wast enamoured of Christ, O blessed one, and didst choose fasting and vigil in the midst of a prince's house; wherefore the Lord glorified thy body with incorruption and gave it to thy city as a wall. O right-believing Gleb, entreat Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Kontakion — Tone 8
Neither fire nor the swords of the godless could touch thy tomb, O prince, for the Lord kept whole what thou hadst kept pure; therefore Vladimir rejoices in thee and cries: hail, O Gleb, young in years and perfect in love.
Iconography
Gleb is written as a young prince: beardless or with the first down of a beard, in the long princely kaftan and the fur-trimmed cap or with the head bare, a cloak fastened at the shoulder, holding a small cross in the right hand — the martyr's and confessor's sign, used here for a life of voluntary hardship — and sometimes a scroll or a model of the Dormition cathedral in the left. He is not given sword or shield, which distinguishes him at once from the warrior-princes, and this restraint is the whole of his type. In Vladimir compositions he stands among the Saints of Vladimir, near Andrew Bogolyubsky his father (who has no entry in this corpus yet) and George of Vladimir.
No pre-1900 icon of him has been located for this collection; a search of Wikimedia Commons under the Russian form of his name returned no results.
Disputed questions
- The year of death is given as 1174 in the Russian calendars and in the OCA's notice; some accounts prefer 1175, and the age is correspondingly nineteen or twenty. The uncertainty is the ordinary uncertainty of the chronicles for a prince who never reigned.
- Gleb or George? The Life and the calendars call him Gleb; the baptismal name George is transmitted alongside it and appears in some older service books. He is not George of Vladimir (Yuri Vsevolodovich, †1238, February 4), the grand prince killed on the river Sit in the same invasion that burned the cathedral over his tomb — a confusion the shared baptismal name and the shared city make easy.
- Not to be confused with Boris and Gleb, the passion-bearers (†1015, July 24 and May 2), the sons of St Vladimir killed by their brother Svyatopolk. That Gleb — Gleb of Murom — is the far more famous saint of the name, and gave this prince his own; but the two are separated by a century and a half, and this Gleb was not murdered and is not a passion-bearer. Nor is he Gleb Yurievich of Kiev (†1171), his uncle, who is not a saint.
- Because his Life records no deed, some modern writers have questioned whether there was ever a cultus independent of the incorrupt relics. The answer of the tradition is that the relics are the cultus: the honour paid to him is the honour paid to a body preserved, and the two miracle-stories attached to him are both stories about the tomb.