Theodore and John the Varangians
The Holy Martyrs Theodore the Varangian and John his son, the first martyrs of Rus'
Martyr · d. 983, at Kiev
Commemorated 12 July — Martyrdom of the father and son at Kiev in the pagan reaction of 983
Theodore, a Varangian who had taken service in Byzantium and been baptised there, and his young son John, were killed by a pagan mob at Kiev in 983, when the lot for a human sacrifice in thanksgiving for Prince Vladimir's victory fell on the boy and the father refused to give him up — "these are not gods, but wood." Father and son stood armed in their doorway until the crowd pulled down the gallery beneath them and killed them both. They are honoured as the first martyrs of Rus', five years before the Baptism of Kiev, and the Church of the Tithes was afterwards raised on the site of their house.
Varangians at Kiev
The Rus' of the tenth century were ruled by a Norse warrior aristocracy and served by Varangian mercenaries, who moved constantly between Kiev and Constantinople along the road "from the Varangians to the Greeks." Many of them were baptised in the empire, and by the 970s there was a Christian minority at Kiev with its own church of St Elias, tolerated and unpersecuted but of no account in public life. Theodore was such a man: a Varangian who had served at Constantinople, had received the faith there, and had come back to Kiev to live quietly in his own compound with his son, whom he had raised as a Christian. The boy — the Chronicle calls him beautiful in face and in soul — is remembered as a youth, not a child.
The lot of 983
Vladimir, who had taken Kiev in 978, was then still a pagan and a zealous one; the Chronicle describes the idols he set on the hill above the Dnieper — Perun with his silver head and golden moustache, Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl and Mokosh — and the sacrifices offered to them. In 983 he returned from a successful campaign against the Yatvingians, and the elders and boyars proposed a thanksgiving beyond the ordinary: that lots be cast on a youth and a maiden, and that whoever was chosen should be slaughtered to the gods.
The lot fell on Theodore's son. When the messengers came and told the father that the gods had chosen the boy for themselves, he answered them — the Chronicle preserves the sense of the speech, and it is the first Christian confession recorded on Russian soil — that these were no gods but a thing made with hands out of wood; that they had mouths and did not speak, eyes and did not see, and would rot away; that there is one God, who made heaven and earth and the stars and man, while these were the carpenters' work; and that he would not hand over his son to devils.
The killing
The answer was reported and the mob came. They broke into the courtyard and surrounded the house; Theodore and John went up into the raised wooden gallery at the front of the house, over the porch, and stood there armed, and the crowd would not face them hand-to-hand. Instead they cut away the posts that carried the gallery, brought the two down with the timbers, and killed them where they fell. The Chronicle ends the notice with the bleak line that no one knows where they were laid, because the men of that time were ignorant and pagan.
Aftermath
The Chronicler places the episode deliberately as the last act of Kievan paganism, five years before the Baptism of Rus', and the older Russian tradition reads it exactly so: the blood of the Varangian and his son is the seed of the Kievan Church. When Vladimir, now baptised, built his great stone church of the Dormition of the Mother of God and endowed it with a tenth of his revenues — the Desyatinnaya, the Church of the Tithes, consecrated in 996 — it was raised, according to the tradition, on the ground where Theodore's house had stood, so that the first church of the new Christian capital covered the place of its first martyrdom. Their commemoration is entered at July 12, and they head every Russian and Ukrainian roll of the saints of the fatherland.
Feast and commemoration
July 12 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 25), in Russian, Ukrainian and OCA usage; they are not on the Greek calendar for this day. They are also commemorated among the Synaxis of the Saints of Kiev and among the saints of the Russian land generally. On the Old Calendar their day falls on the civil July 25 and stands close to the great cluster of Kievan commemorations around Vladimir (July 15) and Olga (July 11) — the Church having arranged the July calendar so that the martyrs who died for refusing the idols are kept within days of the prince who threw the idols down.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Thou wast asked for thy son by them that had no God, and thou didst answer: these are wood and not gods; and standing in thy own doorway with the child thou hadst begotten for Christ, thou didst give him and thyself together to the Lord. O first-fruits of the martyrs of Rus', Theodore and John, pray for the land that was baptised in your blood.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
They are painted together and always as father and son: Theodore a mature man, bearded, in the long belted tunic and mantle of a Varangian retainer — occasionally with a sword or in mail, in the manner of the warrior-saints, though he is not a soldier-martyr in the Byzantine sense — and John a beardless youth at his side, both holding the martyr's cross, the boy's hand often in his father's. Composite icons of the Saints of Kiev and of the Russian land place them at the head of the martyr rank. Where the passion is depicted, the scene is the wooden gallery of the house with the two figures standing above and the crowd below cutting away the posts; behind them the icon may set the Church of the Tithes, which was raised on the place.
No storable image has been found. Searches of Wikimedia Commons under both English and Russian name-forms return no icon of these martyrs at all, still less a pre-1900 one; the familiar images of them are modern Ukrainian and Russian church painting, in copyright. The Menologion of Basil II, which would in any case be the wrong tradition for a Kievan saint, covers only September to February. A the list of icons still being sought entry is recorded instead.
Disputed questions
- Their names are not in the earliest source. The Primary Chronicle (the Povest' vremennykh let), under the year 6491 (983), tells the whole story but names neither father nor son: it says only "a certain Varangian" and "his son." The names Theodore and John appear in the later Prologue notices and in the Kievan hagiographical tradition. This is not a reason to doubt the event, which is reported circumstantially and by a hostile-to-paganism but early source, but the names themselves are a secondary tradition and are recorded here as such.
- The site of the Church of the Tithes. The identification of the Desyatinnaya's site with Theodore's courtyard is a tradition of the Kievan chroniclers and later hagiographers, not an explicit statement of the earliest text. Excavation of the Desyatinnaya foundations has neither confirmed nor refuted it.
- "Protomartyrs of Rus'." They are universally called the first martyrs of the Russian land, and are so in point of time; the technical term protomartyr is reserved in this corpus to Stephen and Thecla, so they are classed simply as martyrs, with the title recorded here.
- Not to be confused with the many other Theodores of the calendar, and in particular not with Theodore of Rostov and Suzdal or Theodore the Silent of the Kiev Caves, Kievan saints of much later date.