Looking at a picture of this saint,
you could say her appearance captures a kind of timid tranquility, innocence, and beauty.
But you should instead be visualizing birds aflame, screeching and squawking as they
drop from the sky like bombs. Imagine houses on fire, an entire town lit up,
and those that can escape, slain on the spot. In the words of the Infographics Show,
this saint was no saint. We mean that figuratively, of course,
because Olga of Kiev did become a saint, Saint Olga. She became a saint for her efforts to spread
Christianity through the Kievan Rus', a part of the world that covered much of modern-day Ukraine,
Belarus, and Russia, hence the word Rus in Russia. We don’t know exactly when Olga was born,
but it could have been somewhere between 890 AD and 925 AD.
When she was about 15 years old, she got hitched to Prince Igor I of Kiev. He was the son of Rurik,
the Rus’ ruler. To cut a long story short, Rurik died, and a guy named Oleg took over, and he did a
lot of vanquishing of tribes. He set up a capital in Kiev, and so we have the name Kievan Rus'.
Russian scholars disagree just how things went down and there are lots of disagreements about
this woman’s life, but there is little doubt that the Kievan Rus' had a difficult relationship with
a Slavic tribe called the Drevlians. These guys had helped the Rus’ in various warring campaigns
against the Byzantine Empire, but once Oleg was dead, they started giving their tribute
money to a local warlord instead of the Rus’. Now Igor was in a bit of a fix, so he decided
to go and visit the Drevlians. This went well at the beginning, seeing as he had turned up with
a large army. The Drevlians said fair enough and handed him some cash and said from now on
they’d pay tribute to him. But then Igor it seems got greedy and went back for more money,
but this time with only a part of his army. We’ll let the Byzantine Greek historian
Leo the Deacon explain what happened when he returned to the Drevlians demanding more cash.
Leo succinctly explained that Igor was “captured by them, tied to tree trunks, and torn in two.”
So, that’s how the star of today’s show, Olga, became the leading woman in the Kievan Rus'.
She’s now called the first woman ever to rule over Russia. Her son, Sviatoslav,
was just three years old at the time and so too young to take the throne.
Understandably, Olga was a bit miffed when she heard that the Drevlians had torn her
husband apart. She wanted revenge, and she wanted it to be so brutal that it would
send shockwaves around that part of the world. Meanwhile, the Drevlians were basking in their
victory and felt confident that they could gain more power. They sent some messengers to visit
Olga, who told her she should think about marrying the guy that murdered her husband.
That guy was a Drevlian prince named Mal. Her response to this offer was thus:
“Your proposal is pleasing to me, indeed, my husband cannot rise again from the dead.
But I desire to honor you tomorrow in the presence of my people. Return now
to your boat and remain there with an aspect of arrogance. I shall send for you on the morrow.”
She even went as far as to tell them that on their return, they’d be carried in their boat,
which seemed to suggest she was bestowing honor on them,
because, let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to be carried in a boat.
The next day, as promised, they were carried in their boat, but things didn’t go as expected for
those Drevlian ambassadors. They were carried all the way to a deep trench that Olga’s men had dug
and thrown right into it. As it was covered in dirt and the men struggled to breathe,
Olga, according to historians of the age, asked them, “Is this honor to your taste.”
She wasn’t done, though, not by a long way. She then sent one of her messengers to the
Drevlians to tell the prince that she welcomed him with open arms. Those who
heard this message had no idea that their party of ambassadors was buried under the ground.
The Drevlians fell for the plot and sent a party of VIPs to Olga, which included the prince. Once
there, Olga said you must be tired from your journey, so we have poured baths for you.
Once they were in the bathhouse, she had the doors locked, and the place was set on fire.
She still wasn’t done. She then sent another message to the Drevlians,
this time saying, “Prepare great quantities of mead in the city where you killed my husband,
that I may weep over his grave and hold a funeral feast for him.”
Mead is booze made by fermenting honey and water.
These people had no idea that Olga had exterminated just about every important
Drevlian. But getting rid of the VIPs wasn’t good enough. She wanted to rid the face of the Earth
of every last Drevlian man, woman, and child. After she arrived in the city, as promised,
everyone drank copious amounts of mead. But then when most of the Drevlians were drunk,
Olga “went about herself egging on her retinue to the massacre of the Drevlians.”
Her army killed around 5,000 people that night, but with a few left, Olga was not yet content.
We told you she was no saint. She spent the next year laying
siege to every Drevlian settlement, but she never quite finished off the city where her
husband had been torn apart. That place today is in Ukraine and called Korosten.
Olga decided to try and fool the Drevlians once more. She wrote them a letter, saying:
“Why do you persist in holding out? All your cities have surrendered to me and
submitted to tribute, so that the inhabitants now cultivate their fields and their lands in peace.
But you had rather tide of hunger, without submitting to tribute.”
They sent a message back, saying something along the lines of “Fool me once, shame on you;
fool me twice, shame on me.” They didn’t believe her. They thought if they laid down their arms,
she and her army would pounce and kill them all. Olga responded, saying, give me three sparrows
and three pigeons from every house, and that will be it. The chronicles state she said,
“I do not desire to impose a heavy tribute, like my husband, but I require only this small gift
from you, for you are impoverished by the siege.” The Drevlians couldn’t believe their luck and
hastily sent the birds. After that, Olga had her men tie sulfur and pieces of cloth to every bird.
That way, when night fell, they could light the sulfur and release the blazing birds on the town.
This is what the chronicle says happened after that:
“So, the birds flew to their nests, the pigeons to the cotes, and the sparrows
under the eaves. The dove-cotes, the coops, the porches, and the haymows were set on fire.”
Not one house was spared from the fires, and so each person fled from the city. One by one, they
were caught and killed on the spot by Olga’s army. She let some live as her slaves, and she allowed
some others to live only if they paid her tribute. You have to remember here that she didn’t just
kill soldiers. She purposefully killed civilians, which is roundly looked down
on in today’s world of warfare. Why then, you’d be right to ask, is she venerated as a saint?
The reason is that she spread the word of Christianity among her people.
The chronicle states she “was radiant among the infidels like a pearl in the mire,
since the people were soiled, and not yet purified of their sin by holy baptism.”
This came after her killing of the Drevlians. It’s written that she traveled to the capital of the
Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, and after having a serious chat with Emperor Constantine VII,
she stopped being a pagan and converted to Christianity.
After that, the chronicle says “Olga was enlightened, she rejoiced in soul and body.”
She died of ill-health, and it would be around six centuries later that she
was made a saint for being “the first from Rus' to enter the kingdom of God.”
She isn’t the only saint in Christian history to have a bit of a shady background,
as you will now see. For instance, there is Saint Dismas,
a name that just sounds kind of bad. He’s sometimes called “The Good Thief” or “The
Wise Thief.” In the bible, he’s always a thief, which isn’t very saintly at all.
He also sounds like a character in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.”
While hanging on the cross with Jesus close to him, Dismas was apparently mocking towards Jesus.
The pain must have been excruciating, but Dismas managed to say something along the lines of,
“If you’re so powerful and the son of God, then why are we still hanging up here on a cross.
Use your power to get us down.” But then another thief said to Dismas,
“We have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes,
but this man has done nothing criminal.” Dismas thought about that and then said to Jesus,
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
Jesus replied, “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
So, Dismas became penitent. He became the Good Thief and that’s why he became a saint.
Then there’s the Christian philosopher saint, who is one of the most important people in the
history of Christianity. He is Saint Augustine, a man who also had a bit of a sketchy past.
His shadiness started early. In his book, “The Confessions”, he wrote that he stole things
when he was a kid not because he needed those things but because stealing was not permitted.
Sounding like Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols, he wrote, “It was foul,
and I loved it. I loved my own error—not that for which I erred, but the error itself.”
Augustine would later understand that there was no place for such behavior in Christianity, but as
a studious teenager, he just couldn’t resist the ways of the flesh. He took lovers before marriage,
even though his mother told him sexual relations as an unmarried man was just plain wrong.
His mom was a Christian, but Augustine became a Manichaean, another religion back then that was
significant next to Christianity. Augustine later had a son out of wedlock and carried
on with his rather hedonistic lifestyle. But he changed all that one day and became
a celibate priest. The rest is history. This incredibly smart man’s theology became the basis
on which much of modern Christianity was founded. Then there was also Saint Matthew. Prior to
becoming a saint, he was a tax collector for the Romans. As a Jew, this made him
immensely unpopular among his people seeing as the Romans fleeced them at any opportunity for their
hard-earned cash. Tax collectors were so hated that he wasn’t even allowed to attend the temple,
and it was considered ceremonially unclean to even be friends with them.
In the eyes of the Jewish people, tax collectors were immoral, evil, and spiritually bankrupt.
Thus when Jesus joined Matthew at his home for dinner with other tax collectors- the only other
people a tax collector could be friends with was his own kind- people complained, asking how could
Jesus eat with one of the sinners. Jesus coolly responded with the words, “I came not to call
the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Matthew stopped tax collecting and became
one of the 12 apostles. So, yet again, this was a story of a person
coming right after committing some wrongs. As for Saint Pelagia, she was roundly disliked,
too. Someone once wrote of her, “Nothing was more vile than she was, when she was on the stage.”
You see, she was a very attractive actress in the ancient city of Antioch.
According to the old texts, which sounded very misogynic, she dressed in fine clothes,
but she always revealed quite a lot of her body. This could drive men wild with lust.
Another person wrote about her, “The men she took as her lovers became intoxicated with her.
For Pelagia’s sake, fathers abandoned their children, wealthy men squandered their estates.
She even seduced the empress’s brother.” For this, she was called a “servant of the devil”,
so the fact she became a saint is something of a miracle. The legend goes that she had a change of
heart and wanted to change her ways, so she got baptized. The same legend says the devil disliked
this and so came up from hell to try and get her back on his side, but she made the sign of the
cross in front of him, and that repelled Satan. Pelagia later built a cell for herself on the
Mount of Olives, and there she did nothing but put her mind to her faith. Because of her
strict asceticism, she died from malnutrition. It’s a similar story with Saint Mary of Egypt.
She was also said to be very attractive. Mary had no money and only managed to eat
by begging or from her side gig as a flax spinner. The thing was, she could have
gotten money from her “services” to men. She slept with them, but she asked for no payment.
The texts state this was because of an “insatiable and an irrepressible passion.”
She either enjoyed the company of men a lot, or she just enjoyed the art of seduction, or she
liked both. But she wasn’t interested in money. After a long time living this lifestyle, one day,
she decided she’d travel to the city of Jerusalem and join the great feast there.
If this sounds like a pilgrimage, think again. It was called an “anti-pilgrimage.”
What she wanted to do was get among the crowds and seduce as many men as possible.
She had apparently managed to get all the way to the city this time by actually charging
men for her services. Once she got there, she also charged the pilgrims she seduced,
but when an invisible force stopped her from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
she suddenly had a change of heart. After being absolved for her sins,
she went out to the desert where she lived the rest of her days surviving on what morsels she
could find to eat. Sometime later, a monk named Zosimas came across her in the desert.
What he saw before him was a naked, skinny woman, who looked like she needed a good meal.
He threw her his cloak so she could cover herself, and then she told him her life story.
They made a plan to meet a year after on Holy Thursday on the banks of the River Jordan.
She did just that, but she walked across the water to meet him, whereupon he gave her Holy Communion.
They planned to meet again in another year, but that never happened. Zosimas did find her,
though, but in the desert at the exact place where he’d found her the first time. In the sand, there
was an inscription that stated she’d died the night after he’d given her that Holy Communion,
but because of a miracle, her body had been taken back to the desert.
Moreover, her body was incorrupt, which in Christian terms means it hadn’t decomposed at all.
He decided to bury her, and to his great fortune, a lion
was nearby who used its paws to make the hole. It would be unfair to call her a brutal saint,
but like Olga, she had perhaps acted with some amount of un-saintliness at the start
of her life. Still, there’s a saying you don’t see in the bible, but it would fit with these
stories. That saying is, “You can’t make an omelet without first breaking a few eggs.”
Now you need to watch “The Exorcism of Saint Mother Teresa.”
Or, scare yourself silly with “Catholic Church Most Terrifying Ghost Stories.”