The Gethsemane Shrine

The relics of Sts. Elizabeth and Barbara since their interment at Gethsemane in 1921: the examination of the relics at ROCOR’s glorification in 1981 and the reports of partial incorruption, their translation from the crypt to the church proper in 1982, the portions distributed to Russia — above all the great tour of 2004–2005, when millions venerated them — and the Russian convent that keeps the saints in the Holy Land today.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (New Martyr; glorified ROCOR 1981, Moscow 1992)

The Relics Examined at the 1981 Glorification

For six decades the relics rested at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, the object of quiet veneration by pilgrims and by the small Russian community of the Holy Land. The decisive moment came with the glorification. On October 31 and November 1, 1981, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), at its Council of Bishops in New York under Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky), glorified the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia — and named among them Grand Duchess Elizabeth and the nun Barbara (synod.com, “St. Elizabeth”; cf. The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia).

In preparation for the glorification the relics at Gethsemane were examined and the coffins opened. By the ROCOR accounts of the examination — reported here as the Church attests them (METHODOLOGY §3.5), and not asserted as forensic fact — the bodies were found to be partially incorrupt, and the opening of the reliquaries was attended by reports of fragrance, in keeping with the older observation made at Harbin in 1920 that the Grand Duchess’s body had suffered little corruption (the repository’s anchor records that “reliquaries of the two Alapaevsk nun-martyrs were opened for veneration at ROCOR’s 1981 glorification”; see new-martyrs-confessors.md). Such reports belong to the genre of hagiographical attestation, not of forensic certification: the Church receives them as signs accompanying the glorification of a saint, and they are transmitted here as the ROCOR sources of 1981 give them. For the celebration in New York, the right hand of St. Elizabeth and a portion of the relics of St. Barbara were carried from Jerusalem to the cathedral, that the faithful of the diaspora — many of them descendants of the very exiles who had fled the Russia of 1918 — might venerate the new saints at the act of their glorification (synod.com, “St. Elizabeth”).

The glorification of 1981 set the seal of the Church Abroad on a veneration that had grown quietly for sixty years. ROCOR, the church of the Russian emigration, held the memory of the New Martyrs at the center of its identity, and in Elizabeth — the German princess who had become wholly Russian and wholly Orthodox, and had died for it — that identity found one of its clearest images. The Moscow Patriarchate would add its own act of glorification eleven years later, at the Bishops’ Council of 1992, naming Elizabeth and Barbara among the New Martyrs; the two glorifications together made the saints’ veneration common to the whole Russian Church, within Russia and without.

From Crypt to Church Proper (1982)

Until the glorification the relics lay in the crypt of the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, where only private veneration was possible. The distinction matters in Orthodox practice: a body awaiting the Church’s judgment rests in the ground or in a crypt, but the relics of a glorified saint are raised up and set in the church for the open veneration of the faithful. In May 1982, in consequence of the 1981 glorification, the relics of both saints were accordingly translated from the crypt up into the church proper — the upper church of St. Mary Magdalene — so that the faithful could venerate them openly, as befits glorified saints (Wikipedia, “Barbara (Yakovleva)”). The translation was itself a liturgical act, the formal raising of the relics that completes a glorification. There the principal relics remain to this day, in shrines within the church, the goal of pilgrims to the Holy Land, who come to venerate the Grand Duchess and her sister in the very place Elizabeth had once said she would be glad to lie.

The Portions Distributed: The Tour of 2004–2005

The reconciliation drawing near between the Moscow Patriarchate and ROCOR (formalized in 2007) made possible an extraordinary act of shared veneration. With the blessing of Patriarch Alexei II of Moscow and of Metropolitan Laurus, First Hierarch of ROCOR — described at the time as the first joint undertaking of the two parts of the Russian Church — a reliquary bearing portions of the relics of Sts. Elizabeth and Barbara was brought from Jerusalem to Russia for an unprecedented tour (sputnikglobe.com, “Sts. Elizabeth and Barbara’s Relics on Way Back to Russia,” August 15, 2004).

The relics were brought from Jerusalem in the summer of 2004 and, beginning from the Far East, were carried westward across the country — a deliberate reversal, in its way, of the eastward flight of 1919–20 that had first carried the relics out of Russia. They departed Vladivostok on August 15, 2004, traveling by the Trans-Siberian Railway, after thousands had already venerated them in the remote eastern cities — Yakutsk, Magadan, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Anadyr, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Coordinated by the St. Andrew the First-Called Foundation, the procession over roughly seven months passed through scores of dioceses across Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union — Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, and Central Asia among them — and was venerated by an immense multitude, the accounts numbering the faithful in the millions across the some sixty-one dioceses visited (sputnikglobe.com; orthochristian.com, “Centenary of transfer of relics …”). In city after city the relics were met by crowds that kept vigil through the night, in scenes the Russian Church understood as the visible vindication of the martyrs. The reliquary returned to Moscow in February 2005, and the principal portion — the right hand of St. Elizabeth — was returned to Jerusalem at the end of February (orthochristian.com).

Of the portions distributed in the course of this and later translations, a reliquary with relics of the saints was given to the Marfo-Mariinskaya Obitel’ — the very Convent of Sts. Martha and Mary that Elizabeth had founded in Moscow in 1909 — when that house was restored after the Soviet period, so that the foundress now rests, in part, in her own obitel, among the sisters who continue the work of mercy she began (orthochristian.com; cf. holynewmartyrs.org). The return of a portion of the relics to that house closed a second arc, as the journey to Jerusalem had closed the first: the abbess driven out of her convent at gunpoint in 1918 was brought back to it in 2004–05 in glory, venerated by the descendants of the very nation that had killed her. Smaller particles have since traveled widely through the Orthodox world; the right hand of St. Elizabeth, kept normally at the ROCOR cathedral in New York, has been brought to Russia and elsewhere for veneration on later occasions, drawing great crowds wherever it has gone (pravoslavie.ru, “Right hand of Grand Duchess Elizabeth the New Martyr arrives in St. Petersburg from NYC”).

The scale of that 2004–05 veneration is itself a fact worth weighing. A reliquary of relics carried from a small church in Gethsemane through more than sixty dioceses, venerated by millions across the lands of the former Soviet Union — the very territory of the regime that had martyred her — is a measure of how completely the verdict of 1918 had been reversed by the turn of the twenty-first century. The German princess thrown into a Ural mine had become one of the most widely venerated saints of the restored Russian Church.

Gethsemane Today

The Church of St. Mary Magdalene, with its golden onion domes above the Garden of Gethsemane, is today the church of a Russian Orthodox women’s convent — the Convent of St. Mary Magdalene (the Gethsemane Convent) — under the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. The community keeps the Holy Land tradition of the Russian Church Abroad: an international sisterhood drawn from many nations, observing the services in Church Slavonic, and caring for the shrine of the saint whose convent of mercy in Moscow stands as the pattern of their own life of prayer and hospitality. As of the present, the principal relics of Sts. Elizabeth and Barbara rest in shrines within the upper church, kept by the ROCOR community of nuns who maintain the daily cycle of services there and receive the pilgrims — Orthodox and otherwise — who come to venerate the Grand Duchess and her faithful sister. In January 2021 the convent kept the centenary of the relics’ arrival, ROCOR having established by synodal decree a feast of their translation on January 17/30 (orthochristian.com, “Centenary of transfer of relics of Sts. Elizabeth and Barbara to Jerusalem”). The wish spoken at Gethsemane in 1888 has become a living shrine: the place where the saint asked to be buried is now the place where she is venerated.

References

ROCOR Council of Bishops. Act of Glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. New York, October 31 / November 1, 1981 — including Sts. Elizabeth and Barbara; reports of the examination of the relics at Gethsemane (the ROCOR 1981 documentation).
“St. Elizabeth.” synod.com (Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia; the bringing of the right hand of St. Elizabeth and a portion of St. Barbara’s relics to New York for the 1981 glorification).
“Barbara (Yakovleva).” Wikipedia (the May 1982 translation of the relics from the crypt to the upper church).
“Sts. Elizabeth and Barbara’s Relics on Way Back to Russia.” Sputnik / sputnikglobe.com, August 15, 2004 (the 2004–05 tour, route, organization by the St. Andrew the First-Called Foundation, and the joint blessing of Patriarch Alexei II and Metropolitan Laurus).
“Centenary of transfer of relics of Sts. Elizabeth and Barbara to Jerusalem celebrated in Gethsemane.” OrthoChristian.com (no. 137071) — the 61 dioceses, the millions of venerators, the return of the relics, and the January 17/30 feast.
“Right hand of Grand Duchess Elizabeth the New Martyr arrives in St. Petersburg from NYC.” Pravoslavie.ru (no. 103248).
Orthodox Church in America. “Grand Duchess Elizabeth.” Lives of the Saints, oca.org.