The Primary Chronicle, compiled at Kyiv in the twelfth century, tells the conversion as a comparison shopping expedition. Vladimir hears out Muslim, Jewish and Latin envoys and sends his own men to observe worship abroad; they report of the Greek liturgy at Constantinople that they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth, and that where God dwells among men they cannot forget such beauty. Modern historians treat the story as later literary construction over a decision that was political and marital, since Vladimir received an imperial bride, but the chronicle's emphasis on beauty as the argument is itself a fair statement of what Byzantine Christianity offered.
Before that, the chronicle describes idols set up on the hill above the city, Perun with a silver head and gold moustache at their head, and afterwards their destruction, Perun dragged to the Dnieper and beaten with sticks as he floated downstream, while the people of the city were baptised in the river in 988.
What followed was built quickly. The church of the Tithes was endowed with a tenth of the prince's revenue; Yaroslav raised Saint Sophia in the next generation, with mosaics and frescoes still in place; and the Caves monastery was founded by two monks in a hillside above the river, growing into the Kyiv Caves Lavra, whose underground galleries hold the naturally preserved bodies of monks and which has been a place of pilgrimage without interruption since. The lives collected in its Patericon are the first monastic literature of the Slavic world.