Medieval (10th century)
Feast: July 11
She buried her husband's murderers alive, burned a city to the ground, and then got baptized. The Church calls her 'Equal to the Apostles.'
Before she was a saint, Olga was terrifying. When the Drevlians murdered her husband, Prince Igor, in 945, they sent twenty ambassadors to propose that Olga marry their own prince instead. She had the ambassadors carried in their boat to a trench and buried alive. She invited a second delegation and locked them in a bathhouse, then set it on fire. She traveled to the Drevlian capital, hosted a funeral feast for her husband, got the locals drunk, and had her soldiers slaughter five thousand of them. Then she burned the city using pigeons with burning tinder tied to their legs — the birds flew home to their nests in the thatch roofs. Nobody crossed Olga twice. And then, somewhere around 957, she traveled to Constantinople and was baptized, taking the Christian name Helena. The Emperor Constantine VII was reportedly so impressed by her intelligence that he proposed marriage; she declined. She returned to Kyiv and tried to convert her son Sviatoslav, but he refused, saying his warriors would laugh at him. She spent her remaining years governing wisely, building churches, and waiting. Her grandson Vladimir eventually accepted baptism in 988 and brought all of Kievan Rus with him. Without Olga's quiet, stubborn Christianity planted in the ruling family, that might never have happened. She died in 969, having lived long enough to see the seed take root but not the harvest.