Theodore Yaroslavich
The Holy Right-believing Prince Theodore Yaroslavich of Novgorod
Prince · Righteous · b. 1218 — d. June 5, 1233
Commemorated 5 June — Repose at Novgorod on the eve of his wedding, 1233
Theodore (1218 – June 5, 1233) was the eldest son of Grand Prince Yaroslav Vsevolodovich and the elder brother of Alexander Nevsky. Set over Novgorod as his father's representative while still a boy, he led troops in the field at thirteen, and died with startling suddenness at fifteen, on or just before the day appointed for his wedding, while the guests and the feast were already assembled. He was buried in the Yuriev monastery outside Novgorod; his relics were found incorrupt when Swedish soldiers broke open the tomb in 1614, and were afterwards translated to the cathedral of Holy Wisdom in Novgorod, where they rest. He is commemorated on June 5.
The princes' sons at Novgorod
Theodore was born in 1218, the eldest surviving son of Yaroslav Vsevolodovich, prince of Pereyaslavl-Zalessky and later Grand Prince of Vladimir, and of his wife Theodosia. The second son, born about 1220, was Alexander, afterwards Nevsky.
Novgorod in that generation invited and expelled its princes at will, and Yaroslav's tenure there was repeatedly interrupted. In 1228 — the chronicles' date; some read 1229 — Yaroslav, obliged to leave the city, left his two boys behind as his representatives, Theodore about ten years old and Alexander about eight, in the care of boyars. It did not last: a rising in the city in the winter of 1228–29 made their position untenable, and the boyars carried the children out of Novgorod by night to Pereyaslavl. The brothers returned with their father when Novgorod recalled him, and Theodore was again the nominal prince of the city.
The chronicles show him growing into the office fast. In 1232 — at fourteen — he was sent with the Novgorod and Pereyaslavl forces on the campaign against the Mordvins in the middle Volga, and is named as its prince-commander, which at that age means that he rode with the army and that the decisions were made by his father's men.
The wedding that did not happen
In 1233 a marriage was arranged for him: the bride was Theodulia, daughter of Michael Vsevolodovich, prince of Chernigov — himself later a martyr at the Horde. The wedding was to be at Novgorod, and the accounts agree in every telling on the detail that makes the event memorable: the bride had come, the guests were assembled, the tables were laid, and the bridegroom died — on June 5, 1233, in his fifteenth year, of no illness the chronicler thought worth naming. "Instead of a wedding," the phrase runs in the Novgorod chronicle, "there was weeping and lamentation."
He was buried in the church of the Yuriev (St George) monastery on the Volkhov south of Novgorod, the burial church of the Novgorodian princes.
The bride did not go home. By the tradition she went instead to Suzdal, entered the convent of the Deposition of the Robe, and became the nun and later abbess Euphrosyne of Suzdal — though the sixteenth-century Life of Euphrosyne names her betrothed differently (a prince "Mina" of Suzdal unknown to the chronicles), and the identification of Theodore as her intended bridegroom, while widely accepted and strongly supported by the coincidence of a bridegroom dying on his wedding day, is not certain. The question is discussed in that entry.
The relics
In 1614, during the Swedish occupation of Novgorod in the Time of Troubles, soldiers plundering the Yuriev monastery broke open Theodore's tomb, and found the body whole and incorrupt after nearly four centuries. In mockery they took it out and stood it upright against the wall of the church. The desecration produced the veneration: the incorruption was now public, and the young prince, hitherto commemorated locally as a princely burial, began to be honoured as a saint.
The relics were subsequently translated into the city, to the cathedral of Holy Wisdom (St Sophia) in Novgorod — the date is given variously as 1616 or 1636 — and laid in the Martirievsky porch among the princes and hierarchs of Novgorod, near the relics of his kinsmen. They remain there.
Veneration
Theodore is venerated as a right-believing prince (blagovernyi kniaz'), the Russian category for a ruler honoured for the piety of his life rather than for martyrdom or asceticism — and in his case for a life cut off before it could be anything else. His cult belongs to Novgorod, where he is named in the synaxis of the saints of Novgorod, and he is commemorated together with Alexander Nevsky in the family reckoning of the house of Yaroslav. In the popular veneration he is the patron of the young dead and is invoked in the sorrow of a death out of season.
Feast and commemoration
June 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 18) — the day of his repose in 1233. The commemoration is Russian, kept also by the Orthodox Church in America, and does not appear in the Greek or Antiochian menaia. He is named in the synaxis of the saints of Novgorod, and the June 5 commemoration in Russian usage falls on the same day as the translation of the relics of Igor of Chernigov and the repose of Constantine, Metropolitan of Kiev, giving the day a marked Russian character over and above the universal commemoration of Dorotheus of Tyre.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a right-believing prince)
While thy years were yet few thou wast set over a great city, and thou didst rule without pride and go out to battle without fear; but the Bridegroom called thee on the day appointed for thy own bridal, and took thee to Himself unspotted by the world. O right-believing Theodore, entreat Christ our God for those who mourn untimely.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Theodore is written as a very young prince: beardless, or with the faintest down of a first beard, which in the Russian convention is the sign of a saint who died in his teens. He wears the princely korzno over a long tunic, with the fur-trimmed cap or bareheaded with the hair falling to the shoulders, and holds a small cross in the right hand — the attribute of a prince honoured for piety and not for arms — sometimes with a sword sheathed at his side in recognition of the Mordvin campaign. Where he is paired with his brother, Alexander Nevsky is the bearded, armoured elder figure and Theodore the smaller, unarmoured, beardless one, and the pairing is the commonest way he is met.
He appears in the synaxis of the saints of Novgorod, in the ranks of the princes beside the Novgorodian hierarchs, and in Novgorodian icons of the Sophia cathedral's saints. No pre-1900 icon of him alone has been located for this collection: a media search of Wikimedia Commons under the Russian form of his name returned no results at all, and images inscribed simply "Saint Theodore" are unattributable to him without an explicit patronymic. As a June saint he is far outside the range of the Menologion of Basil II.
Disputed questions
- Year of birth. 1218 is the received date and is given by the OCA; 1219 is also found.
- The bride. See above and the entry on Euphrosyne of Suzdal: whether Theodulia of Chernigov, the future Euphrosyne, was Theodore's betrothed is probable but unproven, the Life of Euphrosyne naming another bridegroom.
- Cause of death. No source names one. The suddenness and the timing have invited the suspicion of poison in later writing; the chronicles say nothing, and a sudden illness in a fifteen-year-old needs no explanation in that century.
- Date of the translation of the relics. 1616 and 1636 are both given.
- Not to be confused with the other Theodores of the calendar, and in particular not with Theodore the Wonderworker of the Jordan, commemorated on this same day, June 5, with whom he shares nothing but the name and the date. Nor with Theodore "the Black" of Smolensk and Yaroslavl (September 19), nor with Theodore of Chernigov, the boyar martyred with Prince Michael — who was, as it happens, the father of Theodore's intended bride.