He will protect the oppressed and punish the guilty." On the 19th of February, 1054, Yaroslaf died, in the seventy-first year of his age.

His subjects followed his remains in tears to the tomb, in the church of St.Sophia, where his marble monument, carved by Grecian artists, is still shown.

Influenced by a superstition common in those days, he caused the bones of Oleg and Yaropolk, the two murdered brothers of Vlademer, who had perished in the errors of paganism, to be disinterred, baptized, and then consigned to Christian burial in the church of Kief.

He established the first public school in Russia, where three hundred young men, sons of the priests and nobles, received instruction in all those branches which would prepare them for civil or ecclesiastical life.

Ambitious of making Kief the rival of Constantinople, he expended large sums in its decoration.
Grecian artists were munificently patronized, and paintings and mosaics of exquisite workmanship added attraction to churches reared in the highest style of existing art.