Thursday, February 21, 2013

Another's View

Here is what historian Vicki Leon had to say about our patron in her humorous book 4000 Years of Uppity Women:

Russian history includes female rulers who were by turns brutal, bold, and bawdy - and sometimes all three.

Around A.D. 945 a dynamo named Queen Olga was having a dickens of a time. A Slavic tribe had just killed her husband, Igor. As new ruler, she methodically went after the guilty parties, wiping them out in ways designed to put the fear of Olga into the survivors. The first batch of 20 she buried alive; she parboiled the second batch inside their bathhouses. After that she hosted a massacre of 5,000, relying on more conventional sword-stabbing. By now her subjects were quite ready to pay annual tribute and let Olga reign. When she introduced the Greek Orthodox form of Christianity to Russia, peasants and aristocrats alike bought into it, no questions asked. For her outstanding slaughter-for-God work, she was declared a saint - one of only five women to ever win the halo from the Orthodox Church.

And that pretty much sums it up nicely.

Header: St. Olga by artist Gladsome Light via onlythatdotcom where you can purchase this beautiful icon for your shrine to St. Olga, equal-to-the-apostles... and ass kicker

3 comments:

  1. That's a pretty good quote.

    To tide me over until I win the lottery, I have a St. Olga chaplet I found on Etsy awhile back. I have it hanging over the computer, so that every time my brain goes numb, I can just look up and picture Olga telling me, "Get back to work, or I'll parboil you in my bathhouse!"

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  2. That sounds like a wonderful find. And, of course, a serious motivator!

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  3. I love your blog! I need a memento of Saint Olga, she is in my family tree, one of my great, great grandmothers!

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