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From butcher to saint: the improbable life and fate of Vaišvilkas/Vojšelk/Lavryš/Elisej of Lithuania and Black Rus’ (?–1267)

David M. Goldfrank

The ancestors of today’s Lithuanians were the last Europeans to convert to Christianity, and the subject of the sketch that lies ahead was the first or second prince from among these erstwhile pagans to convert to Orthodoxy. The early Lithuanians may have been pressured by the long-standing demographic, political, and military expansion of the neighboring Rus’ and Poles, the aggressive, semi-crusading German colonization of the Eastern Baltic that started in the early 1200s, and an overall situation complicated by Mongol suzerainty over most Rus’ principalities as of the 1240s and papal claims to supremacy over all Christians. Yet not only could these pagan warriors and forest-peasants hold their own against Christian neighbors, but also an expansive Lithuanian polity was taking shape by the 1260s, the time of our story.

The career of our Vojšelk [VOYshelk] – we shall call him at the start by his Rus’ name, the earliest so recorded – fascinated some contemporary and later bookmen interested in regional history. And for good reason. Vojšelk bridged at least four divides: Lithuania-Rus’, paganism-Christianity, warrior prince-monk, and, at least by legend, several Lithuanian rulers and ruling dynasties – here leading to what became the fabulously successful Gediminid-Jagellonians of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.

Our chief sources here are the work of archeologists with material remains and the oldest written records, a few comments by outside observers of pagan Lithuanian life, extant codices for monastic life, and then the chronicles – Polish, Baltic German, but especially Rus’ from Halyč-Volynia, for the flow of politics and the outlines of Vojšelk’s biography. The creative historian’s task is to make sense of all of this fragmentary material – some not at all easy – and craft out of it a reasonably plausible human life. For as a genre, chronicles contain the equivalent of “headlines,” sometimes alone, sometimes with an explanatory sentence or two, sometimes with barely plausible literary embellishments. In the case of Vojšelk, the leitmotif of his stormy career and tragic end, as found in the Halyč-Volynian Chronicle was revised imaginatively over the next 400 years and served as potent foundation myths for both an important Orthodox monastery and the dynasty that initiated the Polish-Lithuanian union in 1386 and reigned over it for 200 years.

The reader might be interested to learn that this semi-fictional sketch of our Vaišvilkas-Vojšelk-Lavryš-Elisej, fleshed out from the available and not entirely reliable written sources, is not the first attempt to abstract, somewhat idealize, and make use of this stormy life. Covering events from 1201 through 1259 or 1260, the pro-Danilo “Halyč” [Galician] part of the Halyč-Volynian Chronicle, credits Danilo for patronizing Vojšelk’s turn to monasticism and trying, ultimately unsuccessfully, to find a route to find him a route to visit Mount Athos. The pro-Vasyl’ko (and also his son Volodymyr) section, taking the story to 1292, exaggerates for sure first Vojšelk’s progress from insatiable human-sacrificing butcher to repentant monk resisting his father’s reproaches; next, after Mindaugas’s murder, as vengeful cleanser of Lithuania who has promised to resume the monastic habit after three years; and then emotionally dependent upon his “father” Vasyl’ko and “son” Švarno, before falling victim to the Devil’s rousing jealousy within Lev toward Švarno – the Volynian annalist’s pretense for the murder.

Sometime in the latter thirteenth-early fourteenth century, annalists in Great Novgorod crafted a different version out of the stories found or in the Halyč-Volynian Chronicle or its sources. Acccordingly, “the Lord” selected as his “champion of the true faith” Mindaugas’s son, “who went from his father and clan to Mt. Sinai, … was baptized, … studied the holy books, and took the tonsure as a monk at the Holy Mountain [Athos], stayed there three years, … and returned to his father.” Rather than renounce Christianity and monasticism, and “armed with the power of the cross,” he departs from his father and founds a monastery, “glorifying the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” After Mindaugas’s murder, Vojšelk, at first unwillingly, follows God’s design to avenge “Christian blood.” With a three-year vow to reassume the monastic habit, and observing the “monk’s” (personal) “rule” (for prayer and fasting), he “gathered his father’s soldiers and allies, prayed to the Holy Cross, attacked pagan Lithuania … and stayed … an entire year. Then God rendered unto those wretches according to their deeds.” There is no mention in this version of Vojšelk’s own murder by Lev, but rather an idealized presaging, facilitating, and coupling with Dovmont’s flight to Pskov.

The Novgorodian reworking of the Halyč-Volynian stories served as boilerplate for later Novgorodian, Pskovian, and Muscovite adaptations and variants. In its most developed form—the late sixteenth-century extended Life of Dovmont–Vojšelk resides at Mt. Athos, but travels twice to Lithuania, once to convert his “brother” Dovmont, and once to “avenge Christian blood.” Note that in all of these Rus’ chronicles, Western, Novgorodian, Pskovia or Eastern, our hero is only Vojšelk [or a variant], but never Lavryš or Elisej or anyone else.

So why do we use these monastic names? The Halyč-Volynian Chronicle, or its underlying source concerning Vojšelk, was also the source of a quite different variant arising in what was claimed to have been his monastery on the Nieman, a variant that also avoids Lev’s murder of our hero. This is Lavryševo in its older location, not far from Navahrudak, and which served as a key center of the Orthodox Church under the Grand Principality of Lithuania in the latter 14th and 15th centuries. Likely in the second half of the 15th century, Lithuania’s Orthodox Rus’ produced as cycle of chronicles that mythologized Lithuania’s dynastic past with a Roman origin and, freely adapting, borrowed heavily from Halyč-Volynian Chronicle material.

Here, the dead or murdered “Roman” appears in the succession as Trojden’s father, who sends his son “Rymont” [also “Lavrymont”] to “Lev Mstislavič” [mistaken for Lev Danilovič] to learn the Rus’ langauge. The youth converts, realizes “that the world is nothing,” and becomes the monk “Lavryš, yet nicknamed Vasylij.” Returning home, he receives from his uncle Narimont not reproaches, but land on the Nieman to construct the “Lavryšov” monastery with its Church of the Holy Resurrection. Dovmont, here again, as in the Halyč-Volynian Chronicle, the victim of wife-seizure, but this time by Trojden, murders him. So Rymont-Lavryš-Vasylij temporarily defrocks, gathers his uncle Narimont’s troops, smashes Dovmont’s forces, and then turns power over to Viten, the progenitor of Lithuania’s new and current dynasty, which is worthy of bearing Narimont’s new escutcheon. This is the vitis – a rearing mounted warrior with sword in hand. If the Halyč-Volynian annalists treated Vojšelk as the legitimizer of their claims to Black Rus’ and Lithuania, then their successors, creators of the so-called “Second Lithuanian-Belarusian Chronicle, did the same for the transformed Vojšelk as legitimizer of the reigning line of Viten-Gediminas-Algirdas-Jogailaàthe current Lithuanian-Polish dynasty.

Later Lithuanian chronicles and histories rediscovered the Halyč-Volynian Vojšelk and integrated his story into the flow of events before Narimont, Trojden, and Lavryš. One, composed in the late 1500s by the Polish canon Maciej Strykowski, has Vojšelk forced by Lithuanians to take the throne in order to keep it out of the hands of the more numerous Rus’, and then treacherously killed by Lev (who is later reproached it by Vasyl’ko and Švarno) for trying to seize Volynia. Finally the mid-seventeenth century Polish Jesuit Albert Wijuk-Kojałowicz found moral poetic justice in Vojšelk’s murder, after he allowed vengefulness to replace “philosophy,” which characterized his monastic calling.

Meanwhile, by 1514 the Lavryševo monks produced their own peculiar anachronistic myth, which combines classical monastic vita tropes and the Halyč-Volynian Vojšelk and may explain the monastic name of “Vasylj” [fusing Vojšelk and Elisej?] of the Lithuanian-Belarusian chronicles. Accordingly, in the early 1200s at the [actually then non-existent] court of the Lithuanian “Grand Prince,” a young [and implicitly, if actually too early, Christian] noble left his high ranking position for solitude. He was discovered by a monk and tonsured by him as Elisej. As in most such vitae, the monk’s heroically stringent life attracted followers. He established Lavryševo in 1225 [at least 30 years too early] on the banks of the Nieman near Navahrudok, and became the first archimandrite [again, normally too early for such a rank for a new cloister, unless richly endowed by a prince or bishop]. The Vojšelk continues, as a crazed youth murders Elisej, following which his grave is the site of continuous miracles.

For sure, some time before 1514 an Elisej must have been for seen as the official founder of Lavryševo, but we know no more than this. However, for the compiler(s) of the Ukrainian 1650s-1670s Hustynia Chronicle, who combined all available traditions concerning both Vojšelk and his purely fictive alter ego Rymont, the monastic name of the latter, as in the Lavryševo vita traditions, is Elisej, not Lavryš. But he cannot be the founder since he is preceded in time by Vojšelk. Being more scrupulous with some of the original chronology, the Ukrainian author places Trojden’s reign correctly after Švarno, but then, adapting from the Lithuanian-Belarus chronicle tradition, has Dovmont of Pskov killing Trojden and occupying the Lithuanian throne, before the latter’s son, our Lavryšev monk Elisej, exits the cloister, gathers troops, avenges his father, and hands the throne over to the worthy Viten and his new Lithuanian dynasty.

Such were the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Belarus, Polish, and Ukrainian reworkings of the Vojšelk motif, but the local Lavryšev version prevails where it counts. Today, revived and relocated in Navahrudok, what was Vojšelk foundation according to the earliest sources is officially “The Saint-Elisej Lavryšev Men’s Monastery.” Check out its website, and you will see the 500–600-year-old Elisej vita story of the 1225 foundation and his murder. We historians and our attempts to flesh out the facts behind cryptic medieval chronicle ‘headlines’ and tales may have our uses, but in the realm of reverent piety, we take a back seat to empowering legends