Eudokia Alexandrovna

The pious Princess Eudokia Alexandrovna (about 1239 to about 1262) was the only daughter of Grand Prince Alexander Nevsky and his first wife, Alexandra Bryachislavna, and is commemorated in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir. She is commemorated on 23 June. Our sources give no date of canonization and show only a local veneration, in church tradition, of a pious princess.

Family

She was born at the latest in 1239, into the family of Grand Prince Alexander Yaroslavich Nevsky of Vladimir and Princess Alexandra Bryachislavna of Polotsk, daughter of Prince Bryachislav Vasilievich. She was the only daughter and one of the prince's five children, with her brothers Basil, Dimitri, Andrew and Daniel. Her mother came from an illustrious family of the princes of Polotsk, which strengthened the dynastic ties of north-⁠eastern Rus' with Polotsk. Her childhood passed in times of constant danger of war, when her father fought the Swedes, the Lithuanians and the Teutonic knights. In the 1250s the family lived mostly in Vladimir, where Eudokia received the usual upbringing of a princess of that time: reading and writing, singing, embroidery and the foundations of Christian piety. According to the source, she was married to Constantine Rostislavich, prince of Smolensk.

Repose

She died young, about 1262, at Vladimir; the date and circumstances of her death are not known. She and her mother have a common grave in the convent of the Dormition of the Mother of God in Vladimir, called the Princess's Convent. In church tradition she is honoured as a pious princess, her name is in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir (23 June), and she appears in the Lives of her father and brothers as an example of purity and Christian humility.

The tomb and veneration

According to a charter of Tsar Ivan IV, preserved in a late copy, which ordered the commemoration of his ancestors buried at Vladimir, commemorations were prescribed. An inventory of 1665 records in the "treasury" of the Princess's Convent a "covering of the pious Grand Princess Eudokia", a sign of local veneration. The inventory of 1686 shows that in the chapel of the Nativity of Christ, on the right side, Grand Princess Alexandra and Princess Eudokia, daughter of Grand Prince Alexander Yaroslavich, rest under a stone. A synodikon of the convent of 1701 includes in the commemoration of the family of Alexander Nevsky, in particular, the "pious Grand Princess Eudokia".

Until the second half of the nineteenth century the burial place was marked by a wooden slab with a cross and gilded quotations from the Gospel. In 1891 Abbess Margaret asked Archbishop Theognostus of Vladimir for permission to renew the tombs of the princesses buried in the convent, and the request was granted, so that Eudokia's tomb, in the south chapel of the Nativity, was covered with sheets of silvered copper. An inscription showing the shared burial was struck on its front. In 1900, during the repair of the chapel, an ancient niche was found in the wall which, according to a seventeenth-⁠century inventory, had been Eudokia's burial place. On 14 July 1900, at the celebration of seven centuries of the convent, a memorial Liturgy for Princesses Alexandra and Eudokia was served in the chapel. Today the shared tomb of Eudokia and Princess Alexandra is in the Dormition cathedral of the Princess's Convent in Vladimir, in a niche of the chapel of the Nativity, where their relics rest under a stone.