Oleg of Bryansk

Saint Oleg of Bryansk (Oleg Romanovich, also called Leonty, in monasticism Basil) the right-⁠believing prince lived in the second half of the thirteenth century, was prince of Bryansk and, according to some sources, grand prince of Chernigov, and then retired to a monastery. The sources agree neither on his family nor on the date of his death, which Orthodox calendars give as 1285, 1289, 1290, 1307 or even 1331. He is commemorated on 20 September (3 October in the new style).

The prince

The sources call him the youngest son of Roman of Bryansk and Chernigov. He is mentioned in the Galician-⁠Volhynian Chronicle under 1274 as a participant in a campaign against Lithuania, with his father Roman Mikhailovich. In 1285 he took part in his father's unsuccessful campaign against Smolensk. Tradition, following the Hypatian Chronicle and church sources, makes him the son of Roman Mikhailovich (1225-1290), the first prince of Bryansk, and a grandson of the holy martyr Michael of Chernigov (1179-1246). He appears in the Lyubech synodikon with his father and is usually regarded as his successor and identified with the grand prince of Chernigov Leonty, mentioned after them. Other historians think Leonty (with the princely name not Oleg but Svyatoslav) was not the son but the younger brother of Roman the Old, and a third view identifies Leonty with Roman's nephew Alexander Konstantinovich, father of Michael Alexandrovich of Chernigov.

According to some Orthodox calendars, in 1286 he gave up the throne of the principality, which he had ascended in 1285 after his father's death, in favour of his brother or, according to other calendars, of Michael, left "twelve tumens" (that is, a hundred and twenty thousand adult men, the population of the principality) and was tonsured with the name Basil in the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul at Bryansk. Other sources say that Oleg founded the new monastery at Bryansk with his own money, called Petropavlovsky, and that a few years after his father's death, leaving his brother as prince of Bryansk, he became a monk there. His successor on the throne of Chernigov is regarded as Michael Dmitrievich, either the son of Dmitry Mstislavich, who fell at the Kalka in 1223, by tradition, or, according to other views, another Dmitry, a nephew or great-⁠nephew of Roman the Old. Scholars do not agree either on who then received the throne of Bryansk: most historians think the Smolensk Rostislavichi gained rights to the throne of Bryansk at the end of the thirteenth century through a dynastic marriage and with the support of the Horde, but opinions differ on who married whom.

The date of death

The earliest date, 1285, probably tied to the last mention of Oleg in the chronicle, is given by some Orthodox calendars. R. V. Zotov, regarding the date in the record of the Petropavlovsky monastery as a scribal error for the year 6740 from the creation of the world, proposes the reading 6798, that is 1290. From a peculiarity of the reckoning of the same date, in ultra-⁠March style, the year 1289 may result, mentioned in other calendars. Filaret (Gumilevsky), in his "Index to the Lives of Russian Saints", gives the year 1307. Sometimes the date of death is shifted to 1331, and V. S. Bezrodnov takes the year 6740 (1232) literally and thinks Roman the Old had a father Oleg and a son Oleg. The Ukrainian source says that church archives show that the prince died as a strict ascetic in that monastery on 20 September 1307 and was buried in the monastery church.

Veneration

Soon after his death, Prince Oleg was numbered among the saints. The reliquary with the saint's relics was placed in one of the churches of the Petropavlovsky monastery. On 10 August 1995, through the efforts of researchers, the relics of the holy prince were found again. Today the holy relics rest in the Petropavlovsky church and are open for veneration. Over the past centuries many icons with the image of the holy prince Oleg of Bryansk were made, among them in the church of the Holy Trinity and other churches. Churches and chapels in his honour are in many places in Russia (among others at Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Pyatigorsk, Ostashevo, Luzhki near Moscow), in Ukraine (at Kharkiv and at Kyiv, where the wooden church in the Darnytsia district was built in four months in 2009 and consecrated on 26 October by Metropolitan Volodymyr, who gave the community an icon of the saint with a particle of relics) and in Belarus (at Dobrush, under construction).