Igor II of Kiev

Igor Olgovich, remembered as Igor II of Kiev, was a twelfth-century Rurikid prince of the Olgovichi branch, the descendants of Oleg Sviatoslavich of Chernigov. That line repeatedly contested the Kievan throne with the Monomakhovichi. Igor held Novgorod-Seversk while his brother Vsevolod Olgovich occupied Kiev from 1139 to 1146. When Vsevolod died in 1146 he named Igor as successor. The designation followed Olgovichi custom but ran against the wishes of many Kievan boyars, who invited Izyaslav Mstislavich, a grandson of Vladimir Monomakh, to take the city instead.

Igor's tenure as grand prince lasted only a short time in the summer of 1146. After a military defeat he was captured and confined. Chronicle tradition records that he later fell ill and asked to be tonsured as a monk. He was received at the Monastery of Saint Theodore in Kiev. In September 1147, while political tension remained high and Izyaslav was absent from the city, a crowd, fearing that the Olgovichi might restore the tonsured prince, broke into the monastery. Attempts by members of the ruling house then present in Kiev to shield him failed. He was dragged from the church precincts and beaten to death on 19 September 1147.

The body was buried at the Church of Saint Simeon in Kiev, a foundation associated with his family. In 1150 his brother Sviatoslav Olgovich, prince of Chernigov, had the remains transferred to the Cathedral of the Holy Saviour in Chernigov (modern Chernihiv). Orthodox tradition came to honor Igor as a passion-bearer, a prince who met a violent death without taking up arms in his own defense, in a pattern already established by the cult of Boris and Gleb. His memory is kept on 5 June, associated with the translation of the relics, and on 19 September, the date of his death.

Surviving chronicles do not record the year or place of Igor's birth, nor do they preserve a securely attested name of a wife or of children. His historical importance rests on the brief Kievan reign, the circumstances of his murder, and the subsequent ecclesiastical cult rather than on a long independent rule. He held no patriarchal or papal office. Veneration developed within the Orthodox Church of Rus and continued in later Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox tradition; a specific individual canonizer is not named in the principal sources in the manner of later papal canonizations.