St. Saviour's Church at Chernigoff. This is reckoned the oldest church now standing in Russia. Yasolaf himself put up at Kiev the metropolitan cathedral, which he named St. Sophia, after Justinian's glorious temple, the ideal of all Greek and Russian churches. His son Vladimir built a second church of St. Sophia in Novgorod. Thus Russia had two modest copies of the famous Byzantine basilica—one in each of his capitals. The metropolitan Theopemptus—the first Russian metropolitan named by Nestor—came to consecrate the Kiev St. Sophia. On his death (a.d. 1051) occurred the first ecclesiastical breach with Constantinople. There had been war between the governments, in the course of which the Byzantine emperor, Constantine Monomachus, the third husband of the notorious Zoe, had put out the eyes of some Russian prisoners. Indignant at the cruel outrage, Yasolaf summoned the Russian bishops to elect a metropolitan from among themselves without reference to the patriarch of Constantinople, and they chose Hilarion, a peace-loving man of devout character, who was the first to move for reconciliation by seeking the benediction of Michael Cerularius the patriarch. This was granted, and thus the brief division between the two branches of the Eastern Church, the cause of which had been in no way ecclesiastical, was healed. The result of the reconciliation was a still closer connection between Constantinople and Russia. The patriarch's authority was being curtailed and crippled in the south by the inroads of the Turks and by the distracted condition of the Byzantine Empire, followed by attempts of emperors to effect union with Rome and the Western Church simply on political grounds, in order to obtain aid in withstanding the serious danger now menacing the empire. At this very time a vast new province of Christendom was opening up in the north and gratefully submitting itself to his rule. It looked as though what he was losing so disastrously in the old regions of the Eastern Church was about to be counterbalanced by splendid acquisitions of missionary achievements, first in Bulgaria,
