FORTY years later, in 907, the Viking warrior Oleg, ruler of Kievan Rus’, swept once again over the Black Sea to Constantinople. He marched up to the city gates, fixed his shield to them proprietorially — and then unexpectedly left, with just a trade deal in his pocket.
Perhaps not entirely unexpectedly, at least not for monk Andrew,* himself a Russian, and his friend Epiphanius. They had crowded with other citizens into the Blachernae church near the city gates to implore the Virgin Mary’s aid, when suddenly Andrew saw Mary herself enter, accompanied by flights of angels who sang her to the heart of the church, where she stopped, knelt, and prayed with tears in her eyes. Then she took the mantle* from her head and shoulders, and seemed to cast it over the congregation. “Do you see, brother, the Holy Theotokos* praying for all the world?” whispered Andrew, and Epiphanius answered in wonder that he did, even as mantle and Virgin dissolved into light, and vanished.
The word ‘mantle’ has been chosen rather than the more usual ‘veil’ because the latter gives the wrong impression. Roman ladies of the first century AD did not wear face-coverings, only head-coverings, a sign of being married.
St Andrew of Constantinople, who died in 936.
‘Theotokos’ means ‘God’s birth-giver’, a title officially recognised at the Council of Ephesus in 431 and again at Chalcedon in 451, but originally much older.