Constantine Vsevolodovich

Constantine Vsevolodovich was the third prince of Yaroslavl, the younger of the two sons of the first Yaroslavl prince, Vsevolod Konstantinovich. He is venerated as a holy right-⁠believing prince, commemorated on 8 June, 3 July (the day of Constantine's death, according to the Serbian source) and 23 May, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl. The record gives the year of death as 1238, which does not agree with the sources (1255 or 1257).

The principal information about Constantine Vsevolodovich has been preserved in Russian genealogical books of the seventeenth century and in the Life of Constantine Vsevolodovich and Vasily Vsevolodovich, written by the Yaroslavl scribe, the monk Pachomius, in the years 1526 to 1533. In the chronicles of north-⁠eastern Russia of the fourteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the Sovereign's Genealogy of 1555 and in private redactions of the genealogical books of the 1560s and 1570s, Constantine Vsevolodovich is not mentioned. The place and circumstances of his death are not known. According to the Yaroslavl tradition, which appeared in historiography in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, he inherited the principality of Yaroslavl after the death of his elder brother and led the anti-⁠Horde uprising in Yaroslavl on 3 July 1257, in which he fell in battle beyond the river Kotorosl; the Serbian source places his death in the battle with the Tatars on Tugova hill, in 1255 or 1257. In the chronicles the Yaroslavl uprising is mentioned under the year 1262, but nothing is said about Prince Constantine Vsevolodovich. The place in Yaroslavl where, according to tradition, the prince and his retinue fell came to be called Tugova Gora, in memory of the fact that there the people of Yaroslavl grieved for their defenders; today there stands the parish cemetery church in the name of Saint Paraskeva Friday.

He was canonized, like his brother Vasily, after the finding of their relics, in 1501, after a fire in the Dormition cathedral of Yaroslavl, where they were buried. The relics became the chief treasure of the cathedral, together with the Yaroslavl icon of the Mother of God, brought, according to tradition, to the city by the brothers. In 1744, through the carelessness of those who put out candles, which were collected in a box standing near the shrine with the relics, the relics burned together with the shrine and the wooden canopy. The surviving parts of the relics were gathered and kept in a new silver shrine in the former place.