St. Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Great Princess Olga of Kiev

Olga was born around the year 890 in the small city of Pskov, in what is now far northwestern Russia. Of her early life little is known. Around 903 she married Igor, son of the Varangian prince Rurik and Grand Prince of Kiev, and bore him one son, Sviatoslav. Igor was killed by the rebellious tribe of the Drevlians in 945, leaving Olga sole regent of Kiev — her son was three years old.

Her vengeance against the Drevlians was a thing of legend. Twenty of their nobles came to her at Kiev to demand that she marry their prince; she had them buried alive in a pit. Another delegation she invited to a bathhouse and burned alive in it. To their capital she came at last with an army, made a treaty for nothing more than three sparrows and three pigeons from each house, tied sulphur and tow to the legs of the birds, and released them at evening; they flew home and the entire city burned. She ruled Kiev with an iron grip for the next twenty years.

In about 955 — already perhaps in her sixties — she went to Constantinople. She had begun, somewhere, to incline toward Christianity. At Constantinople the patriarch Theophylact (or, in another version, his successor Polyeuctus) baptized her himself, with Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus as her godfather. She took the baptismal name Helen, after Constantine's mother — the Equal-to-the-Apostles she meant to imitate.

She returned to Kiev and tried to convert her son and the people. Her son refused: a warrior king of the old style, he was ashamed to be different from his comrades-in-arms. The Kievan nobility he could not entirely persuade either. Olga did what she could: she built the first wooden Church of St. Nicholas at Kiev, sent for Greek missionaries, founded congregations among those of the household who would receive them. She prayed for her son and her grandsons, and especially for her young grandson Vladimir, who was about thirteen when she died.

She reposed at Kiev on July 11, 969. By her own request she was buried in the Christian manner without the pagan funeral games. Vladimir, her grandson, would carry out what she had begun — twenty years later, in 988, the whole nation would be baptized through him. The Russian Church remembers him as the Equal-to-the-Apostles and her as the dawn of the Russian conversion — the first Russian saint by name.