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Saints& Reading: Monday, July 24, 2023

july 24_july 21

COMMEMORATION OF THE MIRACLE ( 451) OF GREAT MARTYR EUPHEMIA, the ALL-PRAISED, OF CHALCEDON (304)

The Holy Great Martyr Euphēmia (Ευφημία) was the daughter of Christian parents, the senator Philophronos and his wife, Theodosia. She suffered for Christ in 304 in Chalcedon, on the Bosphorus opposite Constantinople, the Queen of Cities.

Priscus, the Proconsul of Chalcedon, issued a decree which required all the inhabitants of Chalcedon and the surrounding area to attend a pagan festival to worship and offer sacrifice to the idol of Ares. He threatened grave torments for anyone who failed to appear. During this impious festival, 49 Christians were hidden in one house, where they secretly worshiped the true God. The young virgin Euphēmia was among those who prayed there.

Soon their hiding place was discovered, and they were brought before Priscus to answer the charges against them. For nineteen days, the martyrs were subjected to various torments, but none of them wavered in their faith, nor did they consent to offer sacrifice to the idol. The governor, beside himself with rage and not knowing any other way of forcing the Christians to abandon their faith, sent them to Emperor Diocletian for trial. He kept the youngest, the virgin Euphēmia, hoping that she would not persevere if she were left all alone.

Separated from her fellow Christians, Saint Euphēmia prayed that the Lord Jesus Christ would strengthen her for her impending ordeal. Priscus urged the Saint to offer sacrifice to the idol, promising her many rewards. When she refused, he ordered that she be tortured.

The martyr was tied to a wheel with sharp knives attached to it, which slashed her body. The Saint prayed aloud, and miraculously, the wheel stopped by itself and would not move despite the executioners' efforts. An angel of the Lord came down from Heaven, removed Euphēmia from the wheel, and healed her of her wounds, and the Saint gave thanks to God.

Priscus overlooked the miracle which had taken place, so he ordered the soldiers Victor and Sosthenes to take the Saint to a red-hot furnace. But the soldiers, seeing two Angels amid the flames, refused to carry out the Proconsul's order and declared they believed in the God Whom Euphēmia worshipped. Boldly proclaiming that they were Christians, Victor, and Sosthenes awaited punishment. They were sentenced to be devoured by wild beasts. In the arena, they begged God to forgive their sins, asking the Lord to receive them into the Heavenly Kingdom. A Divine voice was heard, and the two soldiers entered into eternal life. The beasts, however, did not harm their bodies.

Saint Euphēmia, cast into the fire by other soldiers, did not suffer. With God's help, she emerged unscathed after many other torments. Ascribing these things to sorcery, Priscus ordered a pit to be dug. He filled it with knives and covered it with earth and grass so the martyr would not notice this trap.

Once again, Saint Euphēmia remained safe, walking over the pit. Finally, she was sentenced to be devoured by wild beasts in the arena. Before her execution, the Saint prayed that the Lord would deem her worthy of martyrdom. But no bears or lions attacked her, only licked her feet. Finally, one she-bear wounded her foot, which bled slightly, and the Holy Great Martyr Euphēmia died immediately. As her soul departed, there was an earthquake. The city was shaken, the walls fell, and the pagan temples crumbled. As Saint Euphēmia lay dead in the sand, the guards and spectators fled in terror, so the Saint's parents could take her body and bury it near Chalcedon.

Later, a majestic church was built over the grave of the Great Martyr Euphēmia. The sessions of the Fourth Ecumenical Council took place there in the year 451. At that time, the Holy Great Martyr Euphēmia miraculously confirmed the Orthodox confession of faith, exposing the Monophysite heresy. That miracle is commemorated on July 11.

When the Persians captured Chalcedon in 617, the holy Great Martyr Euphēmia relics were transferred to Constantinople (around 620). During the Iconoclast heresy, the reliquary containing Saint Euphēmia's relics seems to have been thrown into the sea, but pious sailors recovered them. They were brought to the island of Lemnos and returned to Constantinople in 796.

The incorrupt body of Saint Euphēmia is in the Patriarchal Church of Saint George at the Phanar in Constantinople. Portions of her relics are to be found in Kykkos Monastery on Cyprus and in the Saint Alexander Nevsky Lavra at Saint Petersburg.

EQUAL-TO-THE-APOSTLES BLESSED GREAT PRINCESS OLGA (969)

Saint Olga, Equal of the Apostles, was the wife of the Kievan Great Prince Igor. The struggle of Christianity with paganism under Igor and Olga, who reigned after Oleg (+ 912), entered a new phase. The Church of Christ in the years following the reign of Igor (+ 945) became a remarkable spiritual and political force in the Russian realm. The preserved text of a treaty of Igor with the Greeks in the year 944 gives an indication of this: it was included by the chronicler in the “Tale of Bygone Years” under the entry recording the events of the year 6453 (945).

The peace treaty had to be sworn to by both the religious communities of Kyiv: “Baptized Rus”, i.e., the Christian, took place in the cathedral church of the holy Prophet of God Elias (July 20); “Unbaptized Rus”, i.e., the pagans, in turn, swore their oath on their weapons in the sanctuary of Perun the Thunderer. The fact that Christians are included in the document in the first place indicates their significant spiritual influence in the life of Kievan Rus.

Evidently, when the treaty of 944 was being drawn up at Constantinople, there were people in power in Kyiv sympathetic to Christianity who recognized the historical inevitability of involving Rus in the life-creating Christian culture. To this trend possibly belonged even Prince Igor himself, whose official position did not permit him personally to go over to the new faith, nor at that time of deciding the issue concerning the Baptism of the whole country with the consequent dispersal throughout it of Orthodox Church hierarchs. The treaty, therefore, was drawn up in a circumspect manner of expression, which would not hinder the prince from ratifying it in either the form of a pagan oath or the form of a Christian oath.

But when the Byzantine emissaries arrived in Kyiv, conditions along the River Dneipr had changed. A pagan opposition had clearly emerged, at the head of which stood the Varangian voivode (military leader) Svenel’d (or Sveinald) and his son Mstislav (Mtsisha) to whom Igor had given holdings in the Drevlyani lands.

Strong also at Kyiv was the influence of the Khazar Jews, who could not but be displeased with the thought of the triumph of Orthodoxy in the Russian Land.

Unable to overcome the customary inertia, Igor remained a pagan and concluded the treaty in a pagan manner, swearing an oath on his sword. He refused the grace of Baptism and was punished for his unbelief. A year later, in 945, rebellious pagans murdered him in the Drevlyanian land and cut down betwixt two trees. But the days of paganism and the lifestyle of the Slavic tribes essential to it were already numbered. The burden of government fell upon the widow of Igor -- the Kyiv Great-princess Olga and her three-year-old son Svyatoslav.

The name of the future enlightener of the Russian Land and of her native region is first to be met with in the “Tale of Bygone Years,” in the phrase where it speaks about the marriage of Igor: “and they brought him a wife from Pskov, by the name of Olga.” She belonged, so specifies the Joakimov Chronicle, to the lineage of the Izborsk princes, one of the obscure ancient-Russian princely dynasties-about twenty, where numbered during the10th-11th Centuries-that were all displaced by the Rurikovichi or merged with them through marriage. Some of them were of local Slavic descent, others Varangian newcomers. It is known that the Scandinavian Viking “Koenigs” (kinglets) called to become princes in the Russian cities. invariably assimilated to the Russian language, often becoming genuinely Russian with Russian names, lifestyle, world outlook, and even physical attire.

Thus, Igor’s wife also had the Varangian name “Helga,” pronounced Olga in Russian. The feminine name Olga corresponds to the masculine name “Oleg” (Helgi), which means “holy” (from German “heilig” for “holy”). Although the pagan understanding of holiness differed from the Christian, it also presupposed a particular frame of reference, chastity, sobriety of mind, and insight within a man. The fact that people called Oleg the Wise-Seer (“Veschi”) and Olga the Wise (“Mudra”) shows the spiritual significance of names. Later traditions regard her as a native of a village named Vybuta, several kilometers from Pskov along the River Velika. Not so long ago, they still pointed out the Olga Bridge at the river, the ancient fording place where Igor met Olga. The Pskov geographic features have preserved several names connected with this great descendent of Pskov: the village of Ol’zhinets and Ol’gino Pole (Olga Field); the Olga Gateway, one of the branches of the River Velika; Olga Hill and the Olga Cross near Lake Pskov; and the Olga Stone at the village of Vybuta.

The beginning of the independent rule of Princess Olga is connected in the chronicles with the narrative about her terrible revenge on the Drevlyani, who murdered Igor. Having sworn their oaths on their swords and believing “only in their swords”, the pagans were doomed by the judgment of God to also perish by the sword (Mt. 26: 52). Worshipping fire among the other primal elements, they found their own doom in the fire. And the Lord chose Olga to fulfill the fiery chastisement.

The struggle for the unity of Rus, for the subordination to the Kievan center of mutually divisive and hostile tribes and principalities paved the way towards the ultimate victory of Christianity in the Russian Land. For Olga, though still a pagan, the Kyiv Christian Church and its Heavenly patron saint, the holy Prophet of God Elias [in icons depicted upon a fiery chariot] stood as a flaming faith and prayer of fire come down from the heavens, and her victory over the Drevlyani—despite the severe harshness of her victory, was a victory of Christian constructive powers in the Russian realm over the dark and destructive. powers of paganism,

The God-wise Olga entered into history as a great builder of the civil life and culture of Kievan Rus. The chronicles are filled with accounts of her incessant “goings” throughout the Russian land with the aim of the well-being and improvement of the civil and domestic manner of life of her subjects. Having consolidated the inner strengthening of the might of the Kyiv great-princely throne, thereby weakening the influence of the hodge-podge of petty local princes in Rus, Olga centralized the whole of state rule with the help of the system of “pogosti” (administrative trade centers). In 946, she went with her son and retinued through the Drevlyani land, “imposing tribute and taxes,” noting the villages, inns, and hunting places, liable for inclusion in the Kiev great-princely holdings. The following year she went to Novgorod, establishing administrative centers along the Rivers Msta and Luga, everywhere leaving visible traces of her activity. “Her lovischa (hunting preserves) were throughout all the land, the boundary signs, her places, and administrative centers, wrote the chronicler, and her sleighs stand at Pskov to this very day, as are her directed places for snaring of birds along the Dneipr and the Desna Rivers; and her village of Ol’zhicha stands to the present day.”

The “pogosti” Olga established as financial-administrative and law-court centers represented sturdy props of great-princely power in these places.

First of all, and in the actual sense of the word, centers of trade and exchange (the merchant as “guest”) gathered together and became organized around the settlements (and in place of the “humanly arbitrary” gathering of tribute and taxes, there now existed uniformity and order with the “pogo” system). Olga’s “pogos” became an essential network of the ethnic and cultural unification of the Russian nation.

Later on, when Olga had become a Christian, they began to erect the first churches at the “pogo”; from the time of the Baptism of Rus, the “post” and church (parish) became inseparably associated. (It was only afterward, with the existence of cemeteries alongside churches, that developed the current meaning of the Russian word “pogos,” which nowadays signifies “parish graveyard”.)

Princess Olga exerted much effort to fortify the defensive might of the land. The cities were built up and strengthened; Vyshgorod (or Detintsa, Kroma) was enclosed with stone and oak walls (battlements) and bristled with ramparts and palisades. Knowing how hostile many were to the idea of strengthening the princely power and the unification of Rus, the princess herself lived constantly “on the hill” over the Dneipr, behind the trusty battlements of Kievan Vyshgorod (“Verkhna-good” or “Upper-city”), surrounded by her faithful retainers. Two-thirds of the gathered tribute, as the chroniclers testify, she gave over for the use of the Kyiv “veche” (city-council), and the remaining one-third went “to Olga, for Vyshgorod” -- for the needs of building fortifications. And to the period of Olga, historians note the establishment of the first state frontiers of Russia -- to the west, with Poland. Heroic outposts to the south guarded the Kievans' peaceful fields from the Wild Plains' peoples. Foreigners hastened to Gardarika (“the land of cities”), as they called Rus, with merchandise and craft wares. Swedes, Danes, and Germans eagerly entered the Russian army as mercenaries. The foreign connections of Kyiv spread. This furthered the development of construction with stone in the city, the beginnings of which were initiated under Olga. The first stone edifices of Kyiv -- the city palace and Olga’s upper enclosure -- were discovered by archaeologists only in this century. (The court, or more properly, its foundations and remains of the walls, were found in excavations during 1971-1972).

But it was not only the strengthening of the civil realm and the improvement of domestic norms of the manner of life for people that attracted the attention of the wise princess. Even more urgent for her was the fundamental transformation of the religious life of Rus, the spiritual transfiguration of the Russian nation. Rus had become a great power. Only two European entities could compare with it during these years in significance and might: in Eastern Europe -- the ancient Byzantine Empire, and in the West, the kingdom of Saxony.

The experience of both empires, connected with the exaltation in the spirit of Christian teaching, with the religious basis of life, showed clearly, that the way to the future greatness of Rus lay not through military means, but first of all and primarily through spiritual conquering and attainment. Having entrusted Kyiv to her teenage son Svyatoslav and seeking grace and truth, Great-princess Olga, in the Summer of 954, set off with a great fleet to Constantinople. This was a peaceful “expedition,” combining the tasks of religious pilgrimage and diplomatic mission, but the political considerations demanded that it become simultaneously a display of the military might of Rus on the Black Sea, which would remind the haughty “Romaioi” [Byzantine Greeks] of the victorious campaigns of Askold and Oleg, who in the year 907 advanced in their shields “to the very gates of Constantinople.”

The result was attained. The appearance of the Russian fleet on the Bosphorus created the necessary effect for developing Russo-Byzantine dialogue. In turn, the southern capital struck the stern daughter of the north with its variety of beauty and grandeur of architecture and its jumbled mixture of pagans and peoples from all over the world. But a great impression was produced by the wealth of Christian churches and the holy things preserved in them. Constantinople, “the city of the imperial Caesar,” the Byzantine Empire, strove in everything to be worthy of the Mother of God, to Whom the city was dedicated by Saint Constantine the Great (May 21) in 330 (see May 11). The Russian princess attended services in the finest churches of Constantinople: Hagia Sophia, at Blachernae, and others.

In her heart, the wise Olga found the desire for holy Orthodoxy, and she decided to become a Christian. The Constantinople Patriarch Theophylactus (933-956) made the sacrament of Baptism over her, and her godfather was the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitos (912-959). At Baptism, she was given the name Helen in honor of the holy Equal of the Apostles Helen (May 21), the mother of Saint Constantine, and she also had been the discoverer of the Venerable Wood of the Cross of the Lord. In an edifying word after the rite, the Patriarch said: “Blessed are you among Russian women, for you have forsaken the darkness and loved the Light. The Russian people shall bless you in all the future generations, from your grandson and great-grandson to your furthermost descendants.” He instructed her in the truths of the Faith, the churchly rules, and the rule of prayer; he explained the commands about fasting, chastity, and charity. “She, however,” says the Monk Nestor, “bowed her head and stood, literally like a sponge absorbing water, listening to the teaching, and bowing down to the Patriarch, she said, “By your prayers, O Master, let me be preserved from the wiles of enemies.”

It is in precisely this way, with a slightly bowed head, that Saint Olga is depicted on one of the frescoes of the Kyiv Sophia cathedral and likewise on a Byzantine miniature contemporary to her in a manuscript portrait of the Chronicles of John Scilitius in the Madrid National Library. The Greek inscription accompanying the tiny terms Olga “Archontissa (i.e., ruler) of Rus,” “a woman, Helga by name, who came to the emperor Constantine and was baptized.” The princess is depicted in special head attire “as a newly-baptized Christian and venerable deaconess of the Russian Church.” Besides her in the same attire of the newly-baptized -- is Malusha (+ 1001), the future mother of the Equal of the Apostles Saint Vladimir (July 15).

For one who had originally disliked the Russians, as did the emperor Constantine Porphyrigenitos, it was no trivial matter for him to become the godfather to the “Archontissa of Rus.” In the Russian chronicles are preserved narratives about this, how resolutely and on an equal footing Olga conversed with the emperor, amazed the Greeks with her spiritual depth and wisdom of governance, and displayed that the Russian nation was quite capable of accepting and assimilating the highest attainments of the Greek religious genius, the finest fruition of Byzantine spirituality and culture. And thus, by a peaceful path, Saint Olga succeeded in “taking Constantinople”, something which no other military leader before her had ever been able to do. According to the witness of the chronicles, the emperor himself had to admit that Olga “had given him the slip” (had outwitted him), and the popular mind, jumbling together into one the traditions about Oleg the Wise and Olga the Wise, sealed in its memory this spiritual victory in the bylina or folk-legend entitled “Concerning the Taking of Constantinople by Princess Olga”.

In his work “About the Ceremonies of the Byzantine Court,” which has survived to the present day in just one copy, Constantine Porphyrigenitos has left us a detailed description of the ceremony surrounding the stay of Saint Olga at Constantinople. He describes a triumphant reception in the famed Magnaura palace, beneath the singing of bronze birds and the roars of copper lions, where Olga appeared with an impressive retinue of 108 men (not counting the men of Svyatoslav’s company). And negotiations took place in the narrower confines of the chambers of the empress, and then a state dinner in the hall of Justinian. And here, during events, there providentially met together at one table the four “majestic ladies”: the grandmother and the mother of holy Equal of the Apostles Saint Vladimir (Saint Olga and her companion Malusha), and the grandmother and the mother of Saint Vladimir’s future spouse Anna (the empress Helen and her daughter-in-law Theophano). Slightly more than half a century would pass, and at the Desyatin church of the Most Holy Theotokos at Kyiv would stand aside each other the marble tombs of Saint Olga, Saint Vladimir, and “Blessed Anna”.

Constantine Porphyrogenitos relates that the Russian princess was presented with a golden plate inset with jewels during one of these receptions. Saint Olga offered it to the vestry of the Sophia cathedral, where at the beginning of the thirteenth century, it was seen and described by the Russian diplomat Dobrynya Yadeikovich (who afterward was to become the Novgorod archbishop Anthony): “The large golden official plate of Olga of Russia, when she took it as tribute, having come to Constantinople; upon the plate be precious stones, and upon it is written in these stones the name Christ”.

Despite her failed attempts at establishing the Church hierarchy within Rus, Saint Olga, after becoming a Christian, zealously devoted herself to efforts of Christian evangelization among the pagans and also church construction: “demanding the distressing of demons and the beginning of life for Christ Jesus”. She built churches: of Saint Nicholas and the church of the Holy Wisdom at Kyiv, of the Annunciation of the Most Holy Theotokos at Vytebsk, and of the Holy Life-Creating Trinity at Pskov. Pskov from that period has been called in the chronicles the Domicile of the Holy Trinity. The church, built by Olga at the River Velika at a spot pointed out to her from on high, according to the chronicler, by a “light-beam of the Thrice-Radiant Divinity”, stood for more than one and a half centuries. In the year 1137, holy Prince Vsevolod-Gabriel (February 11) replaced this wooden temple with one made of stone, which in turn, in 1363, was rebuilt and replaced finally with the presently existing Trinity cathedral.

Another significant monument of Russian “Monument Theology”, as Church architecture frequently is termed, connected with the name of Saint Olga, is the temple of the Wisdom of God at Kyiv, which was started soon after her return from Constantinople, and consecrated on May 11, 960. This day was afterwards observed in the Russian Church as a special Church feastday.

It was no coincidence that Saint Olga received the name of Saint Helen in Baptism, who found the Venerable Wood of the Cross at Jerusalem (March 6). The foremost sacred item in the newly built Kyiv Sophia temple was a piece of the Holy Cross, brought by this new Helen from Constantinople and received by her in blessing from the Constantinople Patriarch. The Cross, by tradition, was hewn out from an entire piece of the Life-Creating Wood of the Lord. Upon the Cross-Wood was inscribed: “The Holy Cross for the Regeneration of the Russian Land, Received by Noble Princess Olga.”

Saint Olga did much to memorialize the first Russian confessors in the Name of Christ: over the grave of Askold, the Saint Nicholas church was built, where according to specific accounts, she was afterward interred. The aforementioned Sophia cathedral was built over the grave of Dir, which stood for half a century and burned in the year 1017. On this spot, Yaroslav the Wise later on built a church of Saint Irene in 1050, but the sacred items of Olga’s Sophia temple were transferred into a stone church of the same name now standing as the Kyiv Sophia, started in 1017 and consecrated about the year 1030. The Prologue of the thirteenth century says about the Olga Cross: “It is now at Kyiv in Saint Sophia in the altar on the right side.” After the Mongols were followed by the Lithuanians who captured the city in 1341, the plundering of Kyiv's holy things was merciless. Under Jagiello in the period of the Lublin Unia, which in 1384 united Poland and Lithuania into one state, the Olga Cross was snatched from the Sophia cathedral and carried off by the Catholics to Lublin. Its further fate is unknown.

But even in Olga’s time, there were at Kyiv among the nobles and retainers no few people who, in the words of Solomon, “hated Wisdom”, and also Saint Olga, for having built Wisdom’s temple. Zealots of the old paganism became all the more emboldened, viewing with hope the coming of age of Svyatoslav, who decidedly spurned the urgings of his mother to accept Christianity and even became angry with her over this. It was necessary to hurry with the intended matter of the Baptism of Rus. The deceit of Byzantium, at the time not wanting to promote Christianity in Rus, played into the hands of the pagans. In search of a solution, Saint Olga looked to the west. No contradiction here yet existed. Saint Olga (+ 969) belonged still to the undivided Church (i.e. before the Great Schism of 1054), and she had scant possibility to study the theological points involved between the Greek and Latin Creeds. The opposition of West and East presented itself to her first as a political rivalry of secondary importance compared with her task, the establishment of the Russian Church, and the Christian enlightenment of Rus.

Under the year 959, the German chronicler named “the Continuant of Reginon” records: “to the king came emissaries of Helen, queen of the Russes, who was baptized in Constantinople, and who sought for their nation to have bishop and priests” King Otto, the future founder of the German Empire, willingly acceded to Olga’s request, but he urged that the matter not be decided in haste.

It turned out that after years, as Olga had foreseen, matters at Kyiv had twisted ultimately in favor of paganism, and Rus, having become neither Orthodox nor Catholic, had second thoughts about accepting Christianity. The pagan reaction was so strong that not only did the German missionaries suffer, but also some of the Kyiv Christians who had been baptized with Olga at Constantinople. By order of Svyatoslav, Saint Olga’s nephew Gleb was killed, and some of the churches built by her were destroyed.

Saint Olga had to endure the humiliation and withdraw fully into matters of personal piety, handing over the reins of governance to her pagan son Svyatoslav. When Svyatoslav left Kyiv on military campaigns and wars, his mother again entrusted the power. But the question about the Baptism of Rus was taken off the agenda for a while, and this was ultimately bitter for Saint Olga, who regarded the good news of the Gospel of Christ as the chief matter in her life.

She meekly endured the sorrow and grief, attempting to help her son in civil and military affairs and to guide matters with heroic intent. The victories of the Russian army were a consolation for her, particularly the destruction of an old enemy of the Russian state—the Khazar Kaganate. Twice, in the years 965 and 969, the armies of Svyatoslav went through the lands of “the foolish Khazars,” forever shattering the might of the Jewish rulers of Priazovia and lower Povolzhia. However, Olga was alone and worried: it was as though, absorbed by military matters in the Balkans, Svyatoslav had forgotten about Kyiv.

In the Spring of 969 the Pechenegs besieged Kiev: “and it was impossible to lead out the horses to water, for the Pechenegs stood at the Lybeda.” The Russian army was far away, at the Danube. Having sent off messengers to her son, Saint Olga herself headed the defense of the capital. When he received the news, Svyatoslav rode quickly to Kyiv, and “he hugged his mother and his children and was distressed, with what had happened with them from the Pechenegs.” But after routing the nomads, the warrior prince began anew to say to his mother: “It does not please me to sit at Kyiv, for I wish to live at Pereslavl’ on the Dunaj (Danube) since that is the center of my lands.”

Svyatoslav dreamed of creating a vast Russian holding from the Danube to the Volga, which would unite all Rus, Bulgaria, Serbia, the Near Black Sea region and Priazovia (Azov region), and extend his borders to those of Constantinople itself. Olga the Wise understood, however, that all the bravery and daring of the Russian companies could not compete with the ancient Byzantine Empire and that the venture of Svyatoslav would fail. But the son would not heed the admonitions of his mother. Saint Olga thereupon said, “You see that I am ill. Why do you want to forsake me? After you bury me, then go wherever you wish.”

Her days were numbered, and her burdens and sorrows sapped her strength. On July 11, 969, Saint Olga died: “With great lament, they mourned her, her son and grandsons and all the people.” In her final years, amidst the triumph of paganism, she had to secretly have a priest by her, so she would not evoke new outbursts of pagan fanaticism. But before her death, having found her former firmness and resolve anew, she forbade to make over her the pagan celebration of the dead, and she gave final instructions to bury her openly in accord with Orthodox ritual. Presbyter Gregory, who was with her at Constantinople in 957, fulfilled her request.

Saint Olga lived, died, and was buried as a Christian. “And thus having lived and well having glorified God in Trinity, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, having worshipped in the blessed faith, she ended her life in the peace of Christ Jesus, our Lord.” As her prophetic testament to succeeding generations, she confessed her faith concerning her nation with deep Christian humility: “God’s will be done! If it pleases God to have mercy upon my native Russian Land, they shall turn their hearts to God, just as I have received this gift.”

God glorified the holy toiler of Orthodoxy, the “initiator of faith” in the Russian Land, using miracles and incorrupt relics. Yakov Mnikh (+ 1072), a hundred years after her death, wrote in his work “Memory and Laudation to Vladimir”: “God has glorified the body of His servant Olga, and her venerable body remains incorrupt to this day.”

Saint Olga glorified God with good deeds in all things, and God glorified her. Under holy Prince Vladimir, ascribed by some as occurring in the year 1007, the relics of Saint Olga were transferred into the Desyatin church of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos and placed within a special sarcophagus, such as was customary to enclose the relics of saints in the Orthodox East. “And hear ye concerning a certain miracle about her: the grave of stone is small in the church of the Holy Mother of God, this church built by the blessed Prince Vladimir, and in the grave is the blessed Olga. And an opening was made in the tomb to behold Olga’s body lying there whole.” But not everyone was given to see this miracle of the incorrupt relics of the saint: “For whoever came with faith, the aperture opened up, and there the venerable body could be seen lying intact, and one would marvel at such a miracle -- the body lying there for so many years without decay. Worthy of all praise is this venerable body: resting in the grave whole, as though sleeping. But for those who did not approach in faith, the grave aperture would not open up, and they would not see this venerable body, but only the grave.”

Thus even after her death, Saint Olga espoused eternal life and resurrection, filling believers with joy and confounding non-believers. She was, in the words of Saint Nestor the Chronicler, “a precursor in the Christian land, like the dawn before sunrise or the twilight before the light.”

The holy Equal of the Apostles, Great Prince Vladimir, himself giving thanks to God on the day of the Baptism of Rus, witnessed before his countrymen concerning Saint Olga with the remarkable words: “The sons of Rus bless you, and also the generations of your descendants.”

Source, all texts: Orthodox Church in America

1 CORINTHIANS 9:13-18

13 Do you not know that those who minister the holy things eat of the things of the temple, and those who serve at the altar partake of the offerings of the altar?14 Even so, the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should live from the gospel. 15 But I have used none of these things, nor have I written that it should be done so to me; for it would be better for me to die than that anyone should make my boasting void. 16 If I preach the gospel, I have nothing to boast of, for necessity is laid upon me; yes, woe is me if I do not! 17 For if I do this willingly, I have a reward; but if against my will, I have been entrusted with a stewardship. 18 What is my reward, then? When I preach the gospel, I may present the gospel of Christ without charge so that I may not abuse my authority.

MATTHEW 16:1-6

1 Then the Pharisees and Sadducees came and tested Him, asked that He show them a sign from heaven. 2 He answered and said to them, "When it is evening you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red; 3 and in the morning, 'It will be foul weather today, for the sky is red and threatening.' Hypocrites! You know how to discern the face of the sky, but you cannot feel the signs of the times. 4 A wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. And He left them and departed. 5 When His disciples came to the other side, they had forgotten to take bread. 6 Then Jesus said to them, "Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees."great princess Olga

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