Download PDF | Griffin, Sean - Byzantine Liturgy in Rus_ The Making of the Kievan Primary Chronicle-Cambridge University Press (2017).
288 Pages
THE LITURGICAL PAST IN BYZANTIUM AND EARLY RUS
The chroniclers of medieval Rus were monks, who celebrated the divine services of the Byzantine church throughout every day. This study is the first to analyse how these rituals shaped their writing of the Rus Primary Chronicle, the first written history of the East Slavs. During the eleventh century, chroniclers in Kiev learned about the conversion of the Roman Empire by celebrating a series of distinctively Byzantine liturgical feasts. When the services concluded, and the clerics sought to compose a native history for their own people, they instinctively drew on the sacred stories that they sang at church. The result was a myth of Christian origins for Rus – a myth promulgated even today by the Russian government – which reproduced the Christian origins myth of the Byzantine Empire. The book uncovers this ritual subtext and reconstructs the intricate web of liturgical narratives that underlie this foundational text of pre-modern Slavic civilization. sean griffin is a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College. His interdisciplinary research focuses on both the most ancient and the most recent periods of Russian and Ukrainian history. He has previously been a Visiting Professor at Stanford University and was a VolkswagenStiftung fellow at Westfälische Wilhems-Universität in Münster, Germany, from 2016–17.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The clerics of early Rus depended on institutional patronage for their daily bread, and modern academic labourers are no different. I gratefully acknowledge therefore the organizations which supported the writing of this book. A research award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and several grants from the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA were crucial sources of early funding. My research, and indeed my career in academia, would have ended with the last sentence of the dissertation were it not for the generosity of two organizations, on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. A fellowship from the VolkswagenStiftung allowed me to spend twelve months at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster, Germany, where I was able to research and write the first half of this book. The second half was completed in a rather different setting, amidst the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire, where it has been my good fortune to be a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College. I shall never forget the moment when this study was born, during a meeting of Gail Lenhoff’s graduate seminar on pre-modern Russia at UCLA. The class was reading about Princess Olga’s visit to Constantinople, and I mentioned that some of the language in the passage had been borrowed from the liturgy. ‘I do not believe anyone has ever noticed that before’, the professor responded. ‘You should write a dissertation on the topic.’ Nearly a decade later, I am delighted to present my adviser with the final results. If this study contains only a fraction of the erudition and rigour which has long characterized her scholarship, then it will indeed have been a worthy undertaking. The same should also be said of another of my mentors in Los Angeles, Ronald Vroon, a man whose enthusiasm, kindness, and devotion to his craft attracted me to the field of Slavic studies in the first place. I am likewise greatly indebted to those who have read and improved drafts of the work, at various stages of its development: Boris Dralyuk, Paweł Figurski, Simon Franklin, Cecilia Gaposchkin, Pierre Gonneau, Roman Koropeckyj, Michael Lavery, Timothy Nunan, Donald Ostrowski, Lynn Patyk, David Prestel, Christian Raffensperger, Barry Scherr, Victoria Somoff, Aleksei Tolochko, Tetiana Vilkul, Alexandra Vukovich, and Monica White. The study also owes much to my friend and colleague Vitaliy Yefimenkov, who assisted me with the translations from Church Slavonic. Perhaps no one has had a greater influence on the final version of this work than the general editor of the series, Rosamond McKitterick. For reasons that shall forever remain a mystery to me, she took an interest in a rather specialized dissertation topic and helped to turn it into a very different sort of book. Rosamond has been a model of professionalism, collegiality, and intellectual generosity throughout the process, and I cannot begin to convey how much this book has benefited from her editorship. I thank my parents, Donald and Joyce, together with my brother Shane, for their steadfast and unconditional support. They raised an athlete and ended up with a medievalist. I hope I have made them proud. I should also express my gratitude to Andrew Gary Hart, my godfather, the man who first introduced me to the life of the mind and the worship of the Russian church. If I have any worth as a scholar, it is because of him. Finally, I thank my brilliant and beautiful wife, Kate, the uncredited co-author of the study. Everywhere she goes, she brings with her light and joy and goodness, and it was only by her light that I was able to write the pages of this book. I therefore dedicate the work to her and to our newborn son, Rowan David.
INTRODUCTION
On an overcast afternoon in November 2016, Vladimir Putin, the president of the Russian Federation, unveiled a massive new monument just outside the walls of the Kremlin, in the heart of Moscow. Beside him at the ceremony stood Patriarch Kirill, primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, and several leading members of the capital’s political and clerical elite. ‘I greet and congratulate all of you with the opening of the monument to Saint Equal-of-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir,’ Putin said in the televised address. ‘The new monument is a tribute to our great ancestor, the esteemed saint, statesman, and warrior, the spiritual founder of the Russian state.’ An enormous bronze statue, rising over sixty feet into the sky, towered over the president as he spoke. It depicted the grand prince with a gigantic cross in one hand and a sword in the other. A cap reminiscent of the shapka of Monomakh, the ancient symbol of Russian monarchy, adorned the saint’s head. ‘Vladimir’s era knew many achievements,’ Putin continued, ‘and the most important of these, the definitive, key achievement, was the baptism of Rus.’ 1 The patriarch was next to take the podium. He too stressed the importance of Vladimir’s conversion, without which, he claimed, ‘there would be no Rus, no Russia, no Russian Orthodox state, no great Russian Empire, and no contemporary Russia’. Behind the patriarch, in a semicircle around the base of the sculpture, stood three bronze reliefs. Each depicted a key event in the national conversion. The first portrayed Vladimir’s siege of Cherson, a port city on the Black Sea. The second depicted his baptism there at the hands of Byzantine clerics. The third showed the grand prince baptising his subjects en masse in Kiev in the year 988. ‘Vladimir was not afraid to alter profoundly the direction of society’s development,’ the patriarch proclaimed. ‘And this determination, this zeal for Christ and integrity in following the Gospel, made him like the apostles, even though they were separated by a thousand years.’ The ceremony concluded with a brief liturgical service. The patriarch solemnly turned and faced the massive statue. In the background, a mixed chorus triumphantly sang the troparion, the main festal hymn, from the liturgical services for Saint Vladimir: Уподобился еси купцу, ищущему добраго бисера, славнодержавный Владимире, на высоте стола седя матере градов, богоспасаемаго Киева: испытуя же и посылая к Царскому граду уведети православную веру, обрел еси безценный бисер – Христа, избравшаго тя, яко втораго Павла, и оттрясшаго слепоту во святей купели, душевную вкупе и телесную. Темже празднуем твое успение, людие твои суще, моли спастися державы твоея Российския начальником и множеству владомых. 2 You were like a merchant seeking a fine pearl, O glorious sovereign Vladimir. Sitting on the throne of the divinely saved Kiev, the mother of cities, you tested [the faiths] and sent servants to the Imperial City to behold the Orthodox faith. You thereby found Christ, the priceless pearl, who chose you as a second Paul, and washed away your spiritual and physical blindness in the holy font. We, your people, therefore celebrate your falling asleep. Pray that the rulers of your Russian state, and the multitude of their subjects, may be saved. The choir concluded, and a deacon loudly intoned the opening prayer of the rite of consecration. The patriarch took up an aspergillum, the liturgical instrument used to sprinkle holy water, and blessed the statue three times with the sign of the cross. The holy water ran down the base of the monument and over the inscription chiselled there in giant Church Slavonic letters: ‘Saint Prince Vladimir Baptiser of Rus’. The choir sang a second hymn, in honour of the life-creating cross, and the ceremony came to a close. The president and patriarch looked into the television cameras that late autumn day and retold an ancient tale. The speeches, the hymns, the honorifics, the bronze reliefs, the massive cross, the inscription: all of these repeated a story about Prince Vladimir recorded in the Rus Primary Chronicle in the early twelfth century and subsequently used as the preface to most major chronicles for the next 500 years. It was a story many in the audience knew by heart. They had learned it in school textbooks and seen it depicted in novels, films, and cartoons. For centuries before that, their ancestors had recounted it in church hymns, lives of the saints, folk songs, and epic tales.3 To the Russians in attendance, and those watching at home, the new statue therefore symbolized more than a revered historical figure. It represented an ancient myth of origins: a myth that had taught the east Slavic peoples who they were and where they had come from since it was first committed to parchment some 900 years earlier.
the great church and stoudite reform
Now picture a different scene. It is a bright spring morning in tenthcentury Constantinople. Romans from across the city stream towards the Great Church, Hagia Sophia, where they will celebrate the feast of the city’s founder and namesake, Saint Constantine the Great, and his mother Saint Helena. Inside the massive cathedral, incense rises from the altar and candles flicker before icons of the saints. The verses of the fiftieth psalm echo across the vast domed sanctuary.4 The chant concludes and a choir of nearly 200 voices takes up the troparion of the feast:5 Τοῦ Σταυροῦ σου τὸν τύπον ἐν οὐρανῷ θεασάμενος, καὶ ὡς ὁ Παῦλος τὴν κλῆσιν οὐκ ἐξ ἀνθρώπων δεξάμενος, ὁ ἐν βασιλεῦσιν, Ἀπόστολός σου Κύριε, Βασιλεύουσαν πόλιν τῇ χειρί σου παρέθετο, ἣν περίσωζε διὰπαντὸς ἐν εἰρήνῃ, πρεσβείαις τῆς Θεοτόκου, ϰάἰ ἐλέησον ἡμᾶς. 6 Beholding the image of your cross in the sky, and like Paul receiving a call not from men, your apostle among kings placed the Imperial City in your hands, O Lord. Preserve it ever in peace, through the supplications of the Mother of God, and have mercy on us. The patriarch of Constantinople, clothed in elaborate vestments, presides over the matins service. He is joined at the ceremony by the emperor, his retinue, and members of the senate.7 Together they prepare to lead a liturgical procession of thousands across the city. One last litany is said, and the holy parade begins. The patriarch and the emperor descend the steps of the Great Church and proceed towards the Church of the Holy Apostles, the final resting place of Constantine and Helena.8 Along the route, they visit various shrines and monuments. Cantors chant psalms and sing hymns, and the clergy recite prayers.9 The sacred story that began at vespers the night before, and continued at matins, is now proclaimed on the city streets. At each station, amidst the incense and icons, the clergy ritually retell the story of the conversion of the Roman Empire. They sing of Constantine’s miraculous conversion and military triumph, of his victory over paganism and unique election into the ranks of the apostles. They praise Helena’s wisdom and commemorate her miraculous finding of the ‘true cross’. Finally, arriving at the doors of Agioi Apostoloi, the patriarch enters the church and celebrates the divine mysteries. The hymns for the imperial pair are chanted once more, this time at the site of their imperial tomb. The thrice-holy refrain of the Trisagion is sung, and the Eucharist distributed.10 Several hours after departing from Hagia Sophia, the patriarch at last delivers the benediction. The annual imperial commemoration of Constantine the Great and his mother Helena draws to an end, to be repeated again the next year, just as it had been every year, since possibly as early as the fifth century.11 The asmatike akolouthia, or sung office, of the Great Church was not the only form of liturgy celebrated in Constantinople on this day.12 Throughout the city, a number of less lavish monastic rites were also served, even as the emperor and patriarch paraded through the streets.13 In earlier eras, the akolouthia ton akoimeton, or office of the sleepless monks, had held sway in the Byzantine capital, but by the tenth century this tradition had largely given way to a revised set of practices associated with the Monastery of Stoudios. In the year 799 a charismatic abbot named Theodore led his monks out of Bithynia, on account of the Arab invasions, and settled in this dying monastic establishment near the Sea of Marmara.14 He subsequently summoned a group of monks from the Lavra of Saint Sabbas, in the Judean desert between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, and together they revitalized the monastery and initiated a series of ground-breaking liturgical reforms.15 For centuries, the church services in Jerusalem and Constantinople had exercised a complex, mutual influence on one another.16 The imperial cathedral rite was distinguished by its ritual grandeur and choral sophistication; the Palestinian rite by its sombre prayer, ascetic rigour, and extensive psalmody.17 In the ninth century, partly in an effort to combat iconoclasm, Theodore and his followers gradually fused these two traditions together.18 They grafted the twenty-four-hour cycle of desert monastic worship, with its numerous psalms, canons, and hymns, onto the skeleton of litanies and prayers said within the altar of the Great Church. The result was a new hybrid rite, the so-called Stoudite synthesis, which was to define eastern Christian worship for the next half millennium.19 A tenth-century spectator, accustomed to the cathedral office, might have been struck by the number of books involved in the monastic ceremonies. Churchmen at Hagia Sophia prayed from long and unwieldy scrolls, measuring up to sixteen metres in length.20 Clerics of the Stoudite federation, on the other hand, chanted from a variety of more recent liturgical anthologies, such as the Menaion, Triodion, and Octoechos.21 These books contained thousands of original hymns, composed over the course of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries by Palestinian hymnodists, such as Saint Cosmos and Saint John of Damascus, and their Stoudite epigones, such as Saint Joseph.22 The newer materials did not necessarily contradict or eliminate the contents of earlier rites, so much as they built and expanded upon them. The Stoudites continued to celebrate the feast of Saints Constantine and Helena, for instance, and the sacred story grew only more elaborate under their management, as additional genres of hymnody, such as stichera and canons, were added to the office.
slavonic church books
The monastic rites were not simply more extensive. They also had the advantage of being highly portable. When the Byzantine faith spread to new lands, it was therefore these more austere services, and not the sumptuous pageant of the Great Church, which came to be celebrated in both monasteries and cathedrals alike.23 The services imported into early Rus are a good case study in this regard. Since the mid-nineteenth century, historians of eastern Christian worship have put forward a number of competing theories about the origins of Slavonic liturgy in Kiev.24 Some have suggested that purely Constantinopolitan practices prevailed there, while others have argued for the influence of a different regional tradition, which they have variously attributed to locales as farranging as Mount Sinai, Mount Athos, eastern and western Bulgaria, and southern Italy.25 Perhaps the most persuasive research has been carried out only recently, within the last decade, at the Moscow Theological Academy. In a series of independent and highly technical studies, two Russian liturgists, Aleksei Pentkovskii and Mikhail Zheltov, have substantially rewritten the history of how Byzantine church books arrived in Rus.26 Previously, it was thought that the main complex of early Rus church books had been translated in Kiev, at one time and in one place, from Stoudite originals brought directly from Constantinople.27 Upon closer examination, however, it turns out that the earliest Rus manuscripts do not precisely conform to the monastic practices then prevalent in the Imperial City.28 On the contrary, the services performed in eleventh-century Kiev appear to have been based on a different and now-lost Greek liturgical tradition: one that was built upon the hybrid Stoudite system, but which also retained a variety of minor regional differences.29 Pentkovskii and Zheltov locate this little-studied Byzantine tradition to the west of Constantinople, in the northern provinces of the Greek mainland, between the Thermaic Gulf and Adriatic Sea. They conclude that the earliest Rus liturgical books therefore preserved the unique, local practices of the archdiocese of Thessalonica, or a diocese still farther to the north, in Epirus or southern Albania.30 Yet one should not imagine that Greek-language service books were driven straight from north-western Byzantium through the gates of Kiev. A crucial link connected the two regions: that of the lakeside city of Ohrid, in the far western reaches of the First Bulgarian Empire.31 It was there, in the final decade of the ninth century, that two ‘bishops of the Slavonic tongue’, Saint Klement and Naum of Ohrid, oversaw the first translations of the Byzantine rite into their native language.32 These former disciples of Saints Methodius and Cyril were not content merely to translate east Roman hymnody, however. They were also keen to write sacred songs of their own.33 Thus, it was from their pens that the earliest Slavonic-language compositions emerged: canons in honour of the Virgin Mary, Saint Clement of Rome, and Saint Dmitrii of Thessalonica, stichera for Christmas and Epiphany, generic services for a general Menaion, and many others.34 The impact of Klement and Naum’s missionary labours was eventually felt beyond the rocky slopes of the southern Balkans. At the close of the tenth century, Prince Vladimir accepted baptism from the eastern church, and it was their translations of the church books that were transported directly from Ohrid into Kiev.35 The Slavonic-language services that first rang out in the monasteries of south-western Bulgaria were therefore also the first liturgical rites to be celebrated in the land of Rus. Although additional redactions of the services were later made in Kiev, apparently in an effort to bring native books into conformity with then-current Stoudite practices, an entirely new translation from the Greek was never carried out.36 As a result, for roughly the next 300 years, whenever the clergy and people of Kiev gathered together and worshipped their God, they sang the ancient songs of Jerusalem and Constantinople, according to the slightly modified customs of north-western Byzantium, using translations made by south Slavic hierarchs in Macedonia. The history of eastern Christian liturgy was truly a ‘global’ or ‘transnational’ event, and yet the purpose of these rituals within the broader medieval Mediterranean remains critically understudied outside the rather specialized discipline of oriental liturgiology. One of the aims of this book, therefore, is to acquaint readers with the solemn, mysterious, and sometimes bizarre religious rituals of the middle Byzantine Empire and its ecclesiastical satellites on the northern periphery. With that end in mind, I have chosen to engage with early medieval liturgical manuscripts in a perhaps novel way: not as the source material for purely linguistic or liturgiological debate, but as the instruction manuals, the guidebooks, for reconstructing a long-overlooked dimension of pre-modern society. These reconstructions are not undertaken for their own sake, however, because this is not principally a book about ritual qua ritual. My primary concern is with the power that liturgy retained outside the walls of the church, when early medieval clerics returned from the services and began to think about the past. I shall therefore resist the temptation to treat church books solely as objects of textual inquiry, sealed off from the rest of the world, like a hermit in his cell. For in my view, it is not only the historical trajectory of these books that is deserving of attention, nor the technical minutiae of differing regional practices. I am convinced that one should also take into account the very special kind of stories that these sacred books contained within them, and which came to life each and every day, whenever the officiating clergy entered the altar, prepared the incense, and performed the sacred rites.37
the roman past in early rus
Let us consider the services that were celebrated in Kiev every year on 21 May. The priests and monks of the city awoke and assembled for morning worship, just as they did any other day of the year.38 At that moment, while they venerated icons and assumed their places in church, the great walls of Constantinople stood nearly a thousand miles to the south. There was no emperor or patriarch at hand, no grand processions being prepared along porticoed streets, no ornate Roman banners or imperial tombs. Yet once the opening blessing was intoned, the clergy and the choir began to chant many of the same hymns that were sung that day at the Monastery of Stoudios and in thousands of other churches across the empire. These songs were being chanted hundreds of miles beyond the northernmost Byzantine frontier, and yet they were devoted to the founders of new Rome, Saints Constantine and Helena: цьсарь отьць ⋅ егоже рака ⋅ ицѣлениꙗ точить ⋅ костѧнтине равьне апостоломъ ⋅ съ материю богомоудрою ⋅ молисѧ о доушахъ нашихъ. 39 The all-radiant light and never-waning star, passing from unbelief to divine understanding, was led to sanctify his people and city. And beholding the image of the cross in the sky, he heard therefrom: ‘By this conquer your enemies!’ And so, having received spiritual understanding as a priest and king, you have mercifully established the church of Christ, O father of all rightbelieving kings, whose relics pour forth healing. O Constantine, equal of the apostles, with your divinely wise mother, pray for our souls. Thus, like their counterparts in Constantinople, Thessalonica, and Ohrid, every year on this feast day, the clergymen in Rus went to church and ritually retold the story of Christian origins of the Roman Empire. They too sang of the weapon of the cross and the triumph of a saintly emperor and equal-of-the-apostles. They too chanted hymns about a miraculous conversion and a devout imperial mother. As time passed, and the services were celebrated over and over again, these songs began to shape the clergy’s conception of more than the imperial Roman past. They began to shape their ideas about the native past and the Christian beginnings of their own people. While standing in the sanctuary and praying, or singing with the choir on the kliros, the clerics learned about the saintly deeds of Constantine and Helena, and we can surmise that their thoughts drifted to the deeds of their own baptiser, Vladimir, and his grandmother Olga.40 Indeed, by the time these clerics set about writing the first native history, the liturgical rites had already taught them what a local myth of Christian origins should look like. They had spent thousands of hours praying and singing about the conversion of the Romans, and they naturally drew on this experience when describing the conversion of the Rus. We can envisage the chroniclers serving the rites in church, removing their vestments in the sacristy, walking back to their writing stations, and preparing their pens and inkpots.41 Perhaps they were working on the original story of the baptism of Rus, or perhaps they were editing and adding to an earlier version. The precise details of what transpired are unknown and unknowable. We can only speculate about the chroniclers’ actual thoughts, methods, or intentions. Nor can we be certain about who wrote the extant tale, when exactly it was written, or where. Barring a major textual discovery, such specifics will remain the arena of neverending doubts and debates. Yet the exact names and dates associated with the story’s creation are perhaps less important than scholars have long believed.42 The story of the baptism of Rus did not originate in the mind of a single scribe or even within a single monastery. I suggest in this book that it was the product of a liturgical myth-making tradition that had developed for centuries in the eastern Roman Empire before being installed in Rus at the end of the first millennium. Year after year, the clerics in Kiev went to church and sang the imperial Roman conversion myths. At some point in the mid-eleventh to early twelfth century, these churchmen returned from the services, readied their pens, and wrote down a similar myth for their own community. Their tale focused on four main figures, all members of the ruling dynasty, and all later recognized as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church. The story began with the baptism of Princess Olga in Constantinople in the mid-tenth century. It continued with the conversion of her grandson, Prince Vladimir, some thirty-five years later. It concluded with the martyrdom of two of Vladimir’s sons, Princes Boris and Gleb, in the year of their father’s passing, 1015. Together these passages formed a myth of Christian origins for the land of Rus that faithfully reproduced the myth of Christian origins for the Roman Empire. The first chroniclers invented a tale of national conversion, and as I shall document in the chapters to come, they based much of that tale, although certainly not all of it, on the myths they knew from the East Roman church books. It was therefore very fitting that the spectacle in Moscow in 2016 ended with a brief liturgical service. For unbeknownst to those gathered there, the myth of Saint Vladimir they commemorated on that November day had its origins, over a thousand years earlier, in the ancient liturgical rites of the Byzantine Empire. The myth had come to Rus on the breath of liturgical chant and found its way into the land’s foundational written history. But the story does not end there. The myths about Vladimir and his kin recorded in the Rus Primary Chronicle later went on to become the myths chanted at their liturgical services. The deeds of the princely clan recounted in the chronicle became the deeds recounted in the native Rus church books. Liturgy became history and became liturgy again. It was this process, this liturgical loop, which ultimately helped Vladimir’s dynasty make the momentous transition from the ranks of earthly rulers to the communion of the saints. The massive bronze statue now towering over Borovitskaia Square thus symbolizes something more than modern Russian identity or Putin’s political agenda in Ukraine. It also attests to the profoundly important relationship that existed between liturgy and historiography in the Christian Middle Ages. Church books and history books were intimately connected in eleventh- and twelfth-century Kiev, and their relationship was rooted in the basic conditions of the era’s material culture and social hierarchy. It is a simple but crucial fact: the men who wrote history and the men who served the liturgy were one and the same. They copied church books and celebrated the services. They copied history books and wrote new passages. When we begin to consider the consequences of this arrangement, and we begin to perceive how perceptions of the past flowed out of the liturgy, into the chronicle, and back into the liturgy once more, it leads us to the very heart of how history was made and disseminated in early Rus. What we need to determine, therefore, is how significantly the consumption of history differed from the way many scholars have imagined it to be. Modern historians sit and read history from a book, and they have naturally assumed their early medieval predecessors did likewise. They have pictured the chronicler sitting at his desk, surrounded by earlier Byzantine chronicles and other historiographical materials, busily composing, redacting, and compiling the first native historical records. This image is not incorrect, but it is probably incomplete. For the chroniclers in Kiev were worshippers first and writers second. I contend that they spent far more of their lives praying at liturgy than they did hunched over a history book. Thus, one of the central questions investigated in this study is whether the ‘historiographical past’ contained in books was really the primary source of information for the clerics writing history in eleventh- and twelfth-century Rus. Rather, we need to consider the degree to which their conception of history reflected not only the materials studied in the scriptorium, but also those chanted at church. We need to take into account not only the textual past, but also the ‘liturgical past’ that these clerics performed daily during the divine services. This was the past of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; of Mary, Jesus Christ, and the apostles; of Roman martyrs, anchorites, emperors, and church fathers. My hypothesis is that historiography first arose in Kiev as an attempt to make the local past conform to this liturgical past, and my evidence for this supposition is the myth of Christian origins in the Rus Primary Chronicle.
In the pages that follow, I shall put forward a new theory about the relationship between liturgy and historiography in early medieval Rus. This is perhaps ironic, because in the process of writing this book the theory came last, not first. The project began as a traditional philological search for subtexts, and this empirical methodology remains the foundation. The core chapters of the study are principally devoted to the textual ‘excavation’ of a single historiographical manuscript. In a series of close readings, I uncover the intricate web of liturgical subtexts underlying ten passages in the earliest East Slavic chronicle. But just as an archaeological dig begins with the tiniest of finds, and then grows to reveal things greater, so the philological excavations at the heart of this work will gradually reveal a dimension of Kievan culture that has long been overlooked. For once the passages have been parsed, and the subtexts identified, what should become clear is that liturgy did not merely influence how history was written and interpreted in early Rus. If my hypothesis is indeed correct, liturgy was the experience of history itself. We should further bear in mind that the situation in Kiev was not unique. All across the continent, from Constantinople to Aachen to Roskilde, clerics served the liturgy and returned to their scriptoria to copy down the past. The themes addressed in this study are therefore relevant not only for a single princedom on the Dnieper but, very possibly, for the whole of medieval Christendom. This is particularly true where the rites of the church are concerned. The picture of liturgy that emerges in this book is not that of an esoteric and incomprehensible pageant, hidden away in the cloisters of the clerical elite. Rather, it is a picture of a very public and very powerful imperial Roman technology. It was a technology that was installed in new lands and that gradually colonized, or converted, the historical imagination of the indigenous population. Wherever a steeple rose above a city skyline, and wherever church bells were heard, the clergy and the people gathered together and performed the sacred rites. Christianity and liturgy were utterly synonymous, regardless of where one was standing on the continent. The study of Byzantine liturgy in Kiev therefore promises to shed new light on some of the period’s most universal questions: how cultural memory was shaped and manipulated; why rulers converted to foreign religions and installed foreign rites; what canonization truly meant and how it was achieved; how new ethno-political identities were born; and, finally, how liturgy and historiography worked together to help create and sustain imagined political communities.
But our story does not begin with these far-reaching theoretical questions. It begins somewhere quite different: aboard a Viking ship, ploughing the cold waters of the Mare Balticum, headed for the dangerous waterways and dense forests of the East European plain.
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