Uliana Paletskaya

The pious Princess Juliana (Uliana) Paletskaya, called also Uliana of Uglich or Uliana the Appanage Princess, was the wife of Prince Yuri Vasilyevich of Uglich, younger brother of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, and later a nun with the name Alexandra. In her time she lived at the top of Moscow society and was remembered by the people as one of the two princesses, with Euphrosyne of Staritsa, who were said to have been drowned in the river Sheksna by the tsar's command in 1569. Research in recent years shows, however, that she died, by all indications a natural death, on 8 May 1574 in the Novodevichy convent in Moscow.

Family and marriage

She was born probably in 1535 or 1536, of the princely Paletsky family, daughter of the boyar Dmitry Fyodorovich Paletsky, called Shchereda, and his wife Maria. Her father, a prominent voivode in the Kazan campaigns and the Livonian War, became a monk at the Kirillo-⁠Belozersky monastery, with the name Dionysius, shortly before his death in 1560. A year earlier her mother had died a nun at Novodevichy, with the name Martha. Uliana had five brothers, Andrei, Boris, Vasily, Semyon and Fyodor, who remained childless; three fell in the Livonian War, Semyon and Fyodor in the battle on the Ula in 1564, and Vasily in the defence of Susha in 1567.

On 3 November 1547, when she was by estimate twelve or thirteen, she was married to Prince Yuri Vasilyevich, aged fifteen, the younger brother of Ivan the Terrible, who was deaf and mute from birth and frail. The tsar set the date of the wedding on his brother's name day, and the brother had first received his permission and then the blessing of Metropolitan Macarius. According to the chronicles, at the bride show Yuri chose the voivode Paletsky's daughter himself; today's historians see in this a political calculation, given the high standing of the Paletsky family and its kinship with the ruling dynasty. That the tsar allowed his brother to marry before an heir was born seems to them unusual, since a son of the brother would have become heir to the throne if Ivan remained childless. Many of the wedding guests were relatives of Tsaritsa Anastasia Yuryevna, of the Zakharin-⁠Yuryev families.

Married life

After the wedding Yuri should have taken possession of the principality of Uglich, left to him in the will of Vasily III, but Ivan disregarded the will and kept his brother and his wife at his own court, at his expense. Information about this period is scant and mostly concerns her part in ceremonies: on 31 May 1550 she appears at the wedding of Prince Vladimir Andreyevich of Staritsa, and on 9 August 1558 she accompanied the tsar, with her husband, at the reception of the icon of the Mother of God and Saint Nicholas brought from captured Narva; in the miniature in Ivan's Illuminated Chronicle she stands in the row immediately after Tsaritsa Anastasia. Other, much later sources speak of her kindness and piety, saying that people called her "a second Anastasia".

On 6 March 1559 her son was born, baptized by Metropolitan Macarius at the Chudov monastery and named Vasily, after his grandfather. Historians think she was a friend of her sister-⁠in-⁠law Tsaritsa Anastasia and that after her son's birth their closeness grew. Soon after Vasily's birth the tsaritsa and the princess gave the Trinity-⁠Sergius Lavra four icons, with prayer for their sons: Saint Cyril of Beloozero, Saint Nicholas, the Annunciation and the Mother of God of Petrovsk. On the frames of the first two are Saint John Climacus and Saint Anastasia, relating to the names of the tsarevich and the tsaritsa, and on the third and fourth Saint Basil of Cherson and the holy martyr Juliana, patrons of the tsar's nephew and his mother. The child died on 20 February 1560, two weeks before his first birthday. Later a daughter, Daria, was born to them, who also died young. In August 1560, after Tsaritsa Anastasia's death, Ivan at last gave Yuri the principality of Uglich, but the couple remained in Moscow, with a court of their own in the Kremlin, in the rooms of the former uncle, Yuri Ivanovich. The principality was governed on by the local body, in which Uliana's relatives played an active part. Their family life lasted sixteen years: on 25 November 1563 Yuri died, barely thirty-⁠one.

Widowhood and tonsure

Ivan took generous care of his brother's widow: for her needs he assigned the revenues of two towns, Kremenets and Ustyuzhna, with all their districts and villages, the Katskaya district, two court villages of Uglich, two villages near Moscow and a mill on the Klyazma with eleven villages. Two other villages of Uglich, Krasnoe and Khorobrovo, were given her in full ownership. On 30 April 1564, five months after her husband's death, aged twenty-⁠eight or twenty-⁠nine, she was tonsured at the Novodevichy convent, where her mother had died. As the second woman of the state after the tsaritsa, her retirement was made with great ceremony: she was escorted by Ivan himself with his second wife, Maria Temryukovna, by Tsarevich Ivan and by a retinue of boyars. At the convent Metropolitan Athanasius met her and tonsured her a nun with the name Alexandra. Her tonsure had been planned with the tsar's knowledge and the convent had been prepared in advance to receive her. She was given spacious quarters with a house church and a kitchen and cellars of her own, a group of noble women and a large staff, including goldwork embroiderers. In the State Historical Museum a silver dish of hers is kept, inscribed "Uliana the Appanage Princess". After her tonsure she kept all the towns and districts she had received.

The story of the drowning, and the truth

For centuries it was believed, on the basis of popular tradition, that after a time Uliana lost the tsar's favour and was moved to the Resurrection convent at Goritsy on the Sheksna, and then killed in the terror of the oprichniki on 15 October 1569, together with Euphrosyne of Staritsa, mother of Prince Vladimir Andreyevich, accused of conspiracy. The latter had indeed been sent to Goritsy, to her own convent. According to one version the two nuns were smothered with smoke, but the more popular says they were drowned in the Sheksna. The chronicle of the Goritsy convent, written two and a half centuries later, cites oral tradition that the two princesses were put in a richly decorated boat, loaded with stones and sunk, with the abbess Anna and a nun named Maria; other sources speak of twelve nuns. This view was held by historians such as Nikolai Karamzin and P. N. Petrov, and at Goritsy a veneration of Uliana and Euphrosyne took shape: on the supposed burial site the cathedral of the Holy Trinity was built, with an empty shrine bearing an explanatory inscription.

From the beginning of the twenty-⁠first century more and more scholars held that she died a natural death in Novodevichy in 1574, which was confirmed by the discovery, in 2025, of her tomb in the undercroft of the Smolensk cathedral of the convent. Nevertheless her memory remained bound in the tradition of believers to the suffering end of the princesses of Goritsy.