Quotes About Volodymyr

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

Despite these unpromising beginnings, Volodymyr must at some point have decided that to keep pace with its neighbours his empire needed an advanced religion.

In 988 Volodymyr ordered that the old thunder-god Perun be dragged down to the river and beaten with sticks, and herded the Kievans into a tributary of the Dnieper for mass baptism. 'Some stood up to their necks,' wrote the chroniclers, 'others to their breasts, and the younger nearer the bank, some of them holding children in their

By choosing Christianity rather than Islam, Volodymyr cast Rus's ambitions for ever in Europe rather than Asia, and by taking Christianity from Byzantium rather than Rome he bound the future Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians together in Orthodoxy, fatally dividing them from their Catholic neighbours the Poles.

I don't want to interfere in U.S. elections.