Michael I of Kyiv

Saint Michael is held, according to the tradition of the Russian Church, to be the first metropolitan of Kyiv and all Rus, from 988 until his repose on 15 June 992 (in other sources, 998). He is commemorated on 15 June, the day of his repose, and on 30 September, the day of the translation of his relics.

His origin is unknown: some accounts make him Syrian, others Bulgarian or Greek. According to church tradition, in 988 a bishop named Michael came from Constantinople, at the commission of Patriarch Nicholas II Chrysoberges, with Princess Anna, sister of the Byzantine emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII, to Cherson, for the baptism of Prince Vladimir of Kyiv, and then to Kyiv, for the baptism of the Kyivans. He himself baptised Vladimir's twelve sons, born of different wives. He blessed Vladimir to raise at Kyiv the Church of the Tithes, dedicated to the Dormition of the Mother of God. Tradition says he founded at Kyiv the Saint Michael's Golden-⁠Domed monastery and the Mezhyhirya monastery near Vyshhorod, with Greek monks. He preached Christianity at Novgorod and Rostov, where he is said to have smashed pagan idols, baptised the people, set priests and built churches; at Rostov he is said to have raised the first wooden church of the Dormition and made Theodore the Greek bishop. He was buried in the Church of the Tithes.

His relics, found incorrupt, were moved to the Near Caves of the Kyiv Caves Lavra and are today in the Dormition cathedral of the Lavra. His veneration is old in the Russian Church, and formerly he was also commemorated, with Anthony and Theodosius, on 2 September.

Scholars today, however, do not recognise this metropolitan as a historical person: the oldest chronicles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries do not mention him, saying that Vladimir was baptised by the bishop of Cherson and the priests who came with Princess Anna; his name appears later in the Church Statute of Vladimir, a text compiled in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which contains anachronisms, and spread in the sixteenth-⁠century Nikon Chronicle. In time the legend attributed to him other deeds, in the Baroque historiography of the seventeenth century. His veneration in the Church is, however, firm.