National Shrines and Women’s Power: The History of Sophia of Minsk, Queen of Denmark

This article compares two national shrines, the Cross of Dagmar (Denmark) and the Cross of St. Euphrosyne (Belarus), providing novel evidence that both crosses could have been made by the same master. It has long been contended that the Cross of Dagmar allegedly belonged to Queen Dagmar from Bohemia, the first wife of the Danish king Valdemar II, son of Sophia of Minsk and Valdemar the Great. A former director of the Danish National Museum, Fritze Lindahl, was the first to propose a hypothesis that the Cross of Dagmar could have come to Denmark together with Sophia via Minsk, Belarus. The purpose of this article is to verify Lindahl’s hypothesis, combining the Belarusian and Danish sources for the first time. The paper also contributes to queenship studies, taking out of oblivion Queen Sophia—a “forgotten queen” of Danish politics and the Baltic Sea region in the 12th century.