Sophia of Slutsk

Saint Sophia of Slutsk, the Right-⁠believing Princess, in the world Sophia Yuryevna Olelkovich-⁠Radziwill, was the last descendant of the Olelkovich princes of Slutsk and Kopyl, descended from Grand Duke Algirdas, a defender of Orthodoxy and a giver of alms. She died on 19 March 1612 and is remembered on 19 March (1 April), on 4 (17) June, in Belarus, and on the third Sunday after Pentecost, in the Synaxis of the Belarusian saints. She was numbered among the saints by the Orthodox Church in 1983 (in one source, on 3 April 1984).

She was born on 1 May, in 1585 or 1586, according to the sources. Her mother, Barbara Kiszka, died the same year, and her father, Prince Yury Olelkovich, died on 6 May 1586, in some sources when she was only five days old. She was raised by distant relatives, first by the governor of Samogitia, Yury Chodkiewicz, who took her to Vilnius, then by Hieronim Chodkiewicz, governor of Brest. Through her inheritance she became the richest bride in Poland and Lithuania, lady of the principalities of Slutsk and Kopyl. Because of debts the Chodkiewicz family owed to the Radziwills, it was arranged that Sophia be betrothed to Janusz Radziwill, Prince of Nesvizh, son of the governor of Vilnius, Krzysztof Radziwill. At that time Sophia was eleven. The wedding was set for 6 February 1600 at Vilnius, but a quarrel over the finances arose between the two families, and the Chodkiewiczes withdrew with Sophia to their castle in Vilnius. Janusz's father gathered six thousand troops, while the Chodkiewiczes had twenty-⁠five hundred; the tension was calmed only when four senators sent by King Sigismund III Vasa began to sue for peace, and the compromise declared void the Radziwills' claims against the Chodkiewiczes, who were indemnified for their handling of the princess's assets.

Janusz Radziwill petitioned Pope Clement VIII on 20 July 1600 for permission to marry Sophia. Because she was adamant in remaining Orthodox and raising any children in the Orthodox faith, this led to a correspondence between the pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople on interdenominational marriage. The Union of Brest of 1596, which moved the Belarusian and Ukrainian Church from the Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Holy See, caused her great grief, for she did not wish to convert to Catholicism, the religion of most of the Polish and Lithuanian nobility (though not of her future husband, who was then a Calvinist). The marriage took place on 1 October 1600, in one of the cathedrals of Brest, according to the Orthodox rite, on the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God.

Sophia spent most of her life on the Olelkovich family estates in Belarus. Because of her husband's frequent travels she devoted herself to religious life and charity. She was an opponent of the church union and a defender of the Orthodox Church, and preserved and founded many churches; in her time Slutsk became an important centre of the Orthodox movement in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. She died on 19 (or 9) March 1612 in the village of Milenets, in her first childbirth. Her only child was born dead (by other accounts she may have had several children, who died soon after birth); according to Athanasius Kalnofoisky, the daughter Catherine died sixteen hours after her mother, and at the Kyiv Caves Lavra there was a tombstone made at her husband's order. Her property passed to Janusz Radziwill and later became the basis of the power of Bogusław Radziwill. She is the heroine of a three-⁠volume novel by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, “Ostatnia z książąt słuckich.” On 3 February 2016 the Council of Bishops of the Russian Church established her church-⁠wide veneration among widely venerated local saints. A church in Minsk bears her name.