St Andrew may not be my name saint, but he is my adopted one. I’ve been following him around all my life, born in Scotland and serving in three of the other countries that have St Andrew as their patron saint – Ukraine, Romania and Russia. Indeed he was in the background before I was even born, when my parents met in St Andrews (the city where the saint’s relics were supposedly brought from Constantinople) – my mother studying languages at the University, my father a curate at St Andrews Church (known as St Andrews, St Andrews).
I can’t say whether there is any truth in the legend that St Andrew was the first to convert the Daco-Romans, though I have visited the monastery by the banks of the Danube in Romania that bears his name, and the cave where the legend says he lived and preached.
I don’t know if he ever made it as far up the Dniepr river as Kyiv and planted a cross on the hill, as the chroniclers relate, prophesying the foundation of a great Christian city on the site. But I passed Rastrelli’s masterpiece, the beautiful baroque St Andrew’s Church, that marks the spot every day on my way to work at the British Embassy in Kyiv.
Here in Moscow too, St Andrew’s is the name of the Anglican Church I attend, standing out like a sore thumb in its red brick high Victorian ecclesiastical style in this city of onion domes and crenulated towers. It is chosen to mark the common Christian ancestry that all these nations trace back to the first apostle.
Just as Scots and Russians will be celebrating St Andrews day this weekend, another day was marked in both countries last month – the 200th anniversary on October 15th of the birth of Mikhail Lermontov. Lermontov was a great poet with Scottish ancestry that reads like a Waverley novel. His ancestor was George Learmonth, a 17th century soldier of fortune who settled in Russia and changed his name to Yuri Lermontov. Mikhail liked to trace his ancestry right back to the Laird of Earlston, Thomas Learmonth, a prophet of the 13th century known as Thomas the Rhymer who Sir Walter Scott features in one of his ballads.
The British Embassy in Moscow features a ‘poetry wall’ – thirty poems of British and Russian authors set into the exterior wall alongside the main entrance on Protochniy Lane. Lermontov is featured with his poem “Rodina” (“My Homeland”) side by side, appropriately, with Robert Burns’ “Address to a Haggis”.
