Vsevolod of Pskov

The Holy Right-⁠Believing Prince Vsevolod, in baptism Gabriel (Gavriil), was prince of Novgorod and then of Pskov in the twelfth century. The Russian Church honours him as the heavenly protector of Pskov and as a builder of churches.

He was born in Novgorod around 1103, the eldest son of Mstislav the Great and Christina, daughter of King Inge the Elder of Sweden, and the grandson of Vladimir Monomakh. It is said that the church of the Annunciation in the Marketplace was built by his father in memory of his birth, and his baptismal name, Gavriil, recalls the archangel of the Annunciation. From 1117, when his father became grand prince of Kiev, Vsevolod ruled Novgorod, with brief interruptions, until 1136.

He led the Novgorodian army on several campaigns: in 1123 against the Chud, which continued in the following years, and in 1133 he took Yuryev (modern Tartu, in Estonia). After his father's death in 1132 his uncle Yaropolk sent him to rule at Pereyaslavl; the Novgorodians, to whom he had sworn to die in their city, considered this a betrayal and did not take him back at once. The campaign of 1134-1135 against the Suzdal land of Yuri Dolgoruky ended in defeat, and the townspeople's discontent grew.

On 28 May 1136 the city assembly deprived him of his seat and held him under guard, with his wife and children, at the archbishop's court until mid-⁠July. He went to Kiev, to Yaropolk, who gave him Vyshgorod. In 1137 the people of Pskov received him as their prince. He died on 11 February 1138 and, as he had wished, was buried in the church of Saint Demetrius in Pskov. Historians regard his expulsion from Novgorod as the beginning of the Novgorod Republic.

Vsevolod built churches in Novgorod and its surroundings: Saint John on Opoki, Saint George in the Marketplace, the Dormition in the Marketplace (together with Archbishop Nifont) and Saint George at the Yuryev monastery. He granted the charter to the wax merchants' guild called Ivan's Hundred; in this document the weight measure called the pud appears for the first time. He married in 1123 a daughter of Svyatoslav Davidovich of Chernigov; their son Ivan died in 1128, and their daughter Vyacheslava became the wife of Duke Bolesław IV the Curly of Poland.

The Russian Church canonised him as Vsevolod-⁠Gavriil, and in the Book of Degrees of the Royal Genealogy he is counted among the wonderworkers of Pskov. His relics were moved from the church of Saint Demetrius to the Trinity Cathedral in the Pskov Kremlin in 1193. The people of Pskov attached his name to a German sword with a Latin inscription, once kept in the cathedral sacristy; modern historians date it no earlier than the fifteenth century. His feast is on 11 February.