Elizabeth Feodorovna

Saint Elizabeth Feodorovna, Grand Duchess of Russia, was born Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, the elder sister of the last Empress Alexandra and the wife of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. After his death she left court life, founded a convent of mercy in Moscow, and was killed by the Bolsheviks at Alapaevsk in July 1918. The Orthodox Church honours her as a venerable martyr. In the Russian Church she is commemorated on 5 July, which is 18 July by the civil calendar, the day on which the Romanian Church also keeps her memory.

Childhood and marriage

She was born on 1 November 1864 at Darmstadt, the second child of Grand Duke Ludwig IV of Hesse and Princess Alice, daughter of Queen Victoria. In the family she was called Ella. The household lived simply by royal standards, the children made their own beds and tidied their rooms, and their mother took them to visit hospitals and the poor. In 1878 an epidemic of diphtheria took her younger sister Marie and, a month later, her mother. Ella alone of the six children did not fall ill.

Many suitors asked for her hand, among them her cousin, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II. She married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the brother of Tsar Alexander III, on 15 June 1884 at the chapel of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. At the wedding Tsarevich Nicholas first met her sister Alix, and Ella later encouraged Alix to accept the Orthodox faith before she married him. The marriage had no children, but the couple raised Sergei's niece and nephew, Maria and Dmitri Pavlovich.

Orthodoxy

Sergei became governor of Moscow, and the couple lived in the Kremlin. Elisabeth had been brought up a Lutheran. She was not required to change her faith, but of her own will she was received into the Orthodox Church by chrismation in 1891, taking the name Elizabeth Feodorovna. Her chrismation drew sharp criticism from some of her relatives. She visited hospitals and almshouses, and in time of war she organized help for wounded soldiers.

Widowhood

On 4 February 1905 (Old Style) Grand Duke Sergei was killed by a bomb thrown by the revolutionary Ivan Kalyayev. Elizabeth ran to the place and, kneeling in the snow, helped to gather his remains. A few days afterwards she went to the prison to see Kalyayev. She told him that she forgave him, urged him to repent, and promised to ask the Tsar to spare his life. He refused, and he was hanged later in 1905. She left a Gospel and an icon in his cell. On the cross over her husband's grave she is said to have placed the words of the Lord, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

The Convent of Martha and Mary

From then on she wore mourning for the rest of her life. In 1909 she sold her jewels, even her wedding ring, and with the money she bought land and houses on Ordynka Street in Moscow. There she founded the Convent of Saints Martha and Mary, with a hospital, a pharmacy, an orphanage and a school. In April 1910 she and the first sisters were consecrated, and she became the abbess. The sisters were to combine prayer with service to the sick and poor. Elizabeth went into the worst slums of Moscow, took abandoned children in, and cared for the dying. During the First World War the convent helped the wounded.

Arrest and martyrdom

After the revolution she refused to leave Russia. In the spring of 1918 she was arrested, sent first to Perm, then to Yekaterinburg, and on 20 May to Alapaevsk in the Urals, with Sister Varvara Yakovleva, her cell attendant, and several members of the imperial family: Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, Princes John, Konstantin and Igor Konstantinovich and Prince Vladimir Paley, and Fyodor Remez, Grand Duke Sergei's secretary.

On the night of 17 to 18 July 1918 they were driven from the school where they were held to an abandoned mine near the village of Siniachikha. They were beaten and thrown into the shaft, and the killers hurled grenades down after them. Sergei Mikhailovich was shot. A Cheka man later reported that he heard hymns coming from the pit, and brushwood was then thrown in and set alight. According to Orthodox tradition, Elizabeth survived the fall and in the shaft bound the wounds of Prince John with her veil before she died, praying for her killers. A recent study by a Russian Church historian, based on the investigator's report of 1918, questions this detail, since the body was found with the head tied in a handkerchief, so it is tradition rather than established fact.

Relics and veneration

On 8 October 1918 the White Army, which had taken Alapaevsk, recovered the bodies from the shaft. They were found in relatively good condition. The remains were carried eastward, buried in the cemetery of the Russian mission in Peking, and in 1921 the bodies of Elizabeth and Sister Varvara were taken to Jerusalem, where they lie in the church of Saint Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives, a convent that she and her husband had helped build.

The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia canonized her in 1981 and the Moscow Patriarchate in 1992. In 2004 and 2005 her relics travelled to Russia and neighbouring countries and were venerated by millions. Her statue stands above the west door of Westminster Abbey among the martyrs of the twentieth century. Her convent in Moscow was reopened in 1992 and continues her work of mercy.