Quotes About Yaroslav

The best surviving key to Rus greatness is Kiev's Santa Sofia Cathedral, built in 1037 by one of the greatest Riurik princes, Prince Yaroslav the Wise. From the outside it looks much like any other baroque Ukrainian church, its original shallow Greek domes and brick walls long covered in gilt and plaster. But inside it breathes the splendid austerity of Byzantium.

Built to celebrate Yaroslav's father Volodymyr's conversion to Christianity, Santa Sofia was intended as, and remains, a place of huge political and spiritual significance. Under the tsars, pilgrims came in millions. (A mournful early graffito reads, 'I drank away my clothes when I was here'.)3

But Kievan Rus's glory days were short-lived. Lying on his deathbed in 1054 Yaroslav had pleaded with his offspring to 'love one another' for 'If ye dwell in envy and dissension, quarrelling with one another, then ye will perish yourselves and bring to ruin the land of your ancestors . . .'11