Gleb of Vladimir

Blessed Prince Gleb of Vladimir (about 1155 or the mid-1160s to 1175 or after 1190) was a son of Grand Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky and patron of the city of Vladimir. He is numbered among the pious princes; his relics are in the Dormition cathedral at Vladimir. He is commemorated on 20 June (Old Style). The chronicles do not mention him, for they know only three sons of Bogolyubsky: Izyaslav, Mstislav and Yuri.

Life

According to later sources, from the age of twelve he read Holy Scripture and other books of spiritual profit with zeal, liked to talk with monks and was marked by meekness, humility, love of the poor and strict abstinence. According to the Life, on 20 June 1175, a few days before the murder of Andrei Bogolyubsky, he died at the age of twenty and was buried with splendour in the cathedral church of the Mother of God at Vladimir on the Klyazma, and for the cries of the people the church singing could not be heard.

The historian Evgeny Golubinsky identified Gleb with the son of Bogolyubsky named Yuri in the chronicles and, comparing the sources, concluded that he died "some years after 1175"; he also supposed that, because of the enmity of his uncles, the grand princes Michael and Vsevolod Yurievich, Gleb ended his short life not at Vladimir and not in any principality, but as a landless wanderer in some foreign princely family, and was brought to Vladimir only for burial.

Veneration

The people of Vladimir have long praised him as a "great wonderworker, worthy and strong among the righteous", and ascribed to his intercession the deliverance of their city from the Lithuanians in 1608. On 30 November 1702 his relics were opened and found incorrupt; the canonization seems to be connected with this. In 1774 the south side chapel of the Dormition cathedral at Vladimir was consecrated in the name of the pious Prince Gleb. Emperor Paul I, venerating his relics, said to the grand princes Alexander and Constantine: "Children, pray to Gleb, the pleasing of God; for the first time I see in Russia relics preserved incorrupt". The Russian biographical dictionary of 1916 said that his relics, by their flexibility, softness and whiteness, give the impression of a living body. On 12 and 15 February 1919 his relics and those of other saints of Vladimir were opened, and the record showed an exceptionally good state of preservation; they were removed from the cathedral and returned to the Church in the 1950s. Today they are in the Dormition cathedral at Vladimir.