To Jerusalem: The Odyssey of the Relics

The journey of the relics of Sts. Elizabeth and Barbara out of Russia and across half the world: their custody by the hieromonk Seraphim Kuznetsov, the long passage with the White retreat through Siberia to China in 1919–1920, the interlude in the crypt of the Russian mission church at Beijing, and the final voyage to Jerusalem arranged through the saint’s own family — fulfilling, providentially, the wish Elizabeth had expressed at the Garden of Gethsemane in 1888.

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

Out of Alapaevsk

When the bodies were raised from the Nizhnyaya Selimskaya mine in October 1918 and coffined, they could not remain where they were. The White hold on the Urals was tenuous, and as the Red Army advanced through 1919 the eight Alapaevsk coffins had to be moved east with the retreating Whites or be lost to the Bolsheviks. After the recovery the bodies were first brought into Alapaevsk and lay for a time in the town’s cemetery church; from there, as the front grew unstable, they were taken to safer ground further east. The man who took up their custody was the hieromonk Seraphim (Kuznetsov), abbot of the St. Seraphim Hermitage near Perm, who had known the Grand Duchess and now made it his charge to carry the relics to safety (orthodox.cn, “Sts Elizabeth, Barbara and the other Alapayevsk Martyrs”; pravmir.com, “The Final Journey of the Royal New Martyr Elizabeth”).

That a single monk should have shepherded eight coffins across a continent in collapse is itself remarkable. The civil war made every stage of the passage precarious: rail lines were cut and recaptured, the typhus that ravaged the retreating armies threatened the living who guarded the dead, and the danger of the relics falling into Bolshevik hands — to be destroyed or desecrated — was constant. Fr. Seraphim’s perseverance through these conditions is the human thread on which the whole later history of the shrine hangs; without his refusal to abandon the coffins, the relics that now rest at Gethsemane would in all likelihood have been lost in the Urals in 1919.

Across Siberia with the White Retreat (1919–1920)

The journey that followed was an ordeal measured in months and thousands of miles. Fr. Seraphim accompanied the coffins eastward across Siberia as the front collapsed behind them — by rail where the line held, the coffins repeatedly endangered by the chaos of the retreat. The route ran by way of Chita, in the Transbaikal, where the relics rested for a time under the protection of Ataman Semyonov’s authority before the advance of the Reds forced their removal once more (Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”; orthodox.cn). From Chita the coffins were taken on toward the Chinese frontier.

Crossing into China, the relics passed through Hailar at the end of February 1920 and reached Harbin, the great Russian railway city of Manchuria — by then crowded with refugees from the revolution — at the beginning of March (orthodox.cn, “Sts Elizabeth, Barbara and the other Alapayevsk Martyrs”). At Harbin, by the accounts preserved in the Russian ecclesiastical mission’s records, the coffin of the Grand Duchess was opened, and her body — despite the violence of her death and the long months in the flooded shaft — was found to have suffered comparatively little corruption, an observation that strengthened the resolve of those carrying her to bring the relics to a worthy resting place (pravmir.com). The detail is reported here as the mission’s record gives it (METHODOLOGY §3.5), as an observation made by those who opened the coffin, not as a forensic finding; it belongs to the same chain of attestation as the later reports at the 1981 glorification, and the two are consistent with one another.

The Beijing Interlude

From Harbin the relics were brought on to Beijing, to the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission, then under Archbishop Innocent (Figurovsky), which received the coffins and gave them sanctuary. There the eight coffins were placed in the crypt of the cemetery church of St. Seraphim of Sarov, outside the northeastern wall of the city, on April 3/16, 1920 (orthodox.cn, “Sts Elizabeth, Barbara and the other Alapayevsk Martyrs”). For most of the Alapaevsk martyrs this Beijing crypt would be, for many years, the end of the road; the relics of the Romanov princes and of Fyodor Remez remained in China, and their later fate amid the upheavals of the twentieth century in Beijing is uncertain. But for Elizabeth and Barbara the Beijing crypt was only an interlude. While the relics lay there, the question of their further fate was decided by the Grand Duchess’s surviving family in the West, who could not bear that the body of one so venerated should rest indefinitely in a wartime crypt far from any Orthodox holy place.

The Family Negotiation and the Passage to Jerusalem

The decision to move the two coffins onward came from Elizabeth’s own family in the West. Her surviving sisters and relatives — scattered across the courts of Europe and bound to the British royal house through their grandmother Queen Victoria — would not consent to leave her body in a Beijing crypt. Elizabeth’s elder sister, Princess Victoria of Battenberg (Marchioness of Milford Haven), the mother of Lord Louis Mountbatten and grandmother of the future Duke of Edinburgh, undertook to have the relics of Elizabeth and Barbara brought from China to the Holy Land — to the church the Imperial family had built in Gethsemane, where Elizabeth had once said she would be glad to be buried (Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”; pravmir.com). At her request, and with the assistance of the Russian mission and the British authorities then governing Palestine under the mandate, arrangements were made to separate the two coffins from the rest and to ship them to Jerusalem. That the relics could be received at Gethsemane at all owed much to the standing of the Russian ecclesiastical presence in the Holy Land and to the goodwill of the British administration, which permitted the burial of the Russian martyrs in the church the Romanovs had raised there a generation before.

The two coffins were exhumed at Beijing and sent to Tianjin on November 17/30, 1920, departing by steamship on November 18 and reaching Shanghai on November 21. From Shanghai they sailed on December 2/15, 1920, by sea — the long route by way of the Suez Canal and Port Said to the coast of Palestine (orthodox.cn, “Sts Elizabeth, Barbara and the other Alapayevsk Martyrs”). The relics arrived in Jerusalem on January 15/28, 1921, and were solemnly received — met, by the accounts, by the Orthodox of the city, by the British high commissioner, and by what remained of the Russian community in the Holy Land (orthodox.cn; holynewmartyrs.org).

The Interment at Gethsemane (January 1921)

The coffins were brought to the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Gethsemane, at the foot of the Mount of Olives — the church built in 1888 by Tsar Alexander III and his brothers in memory of their mother, the Empress Maria Alexandrovna. Elizabeth had attended its consecration in October 1888, in the company of her husband Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, with whom she had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; and tradition records that, struck by the beauty of the place — the white church with its golden domes against the slope of the Mount of Olives, looking across the Kidron valley to the walls of the Old City — she had said she would be content to be buried there. At that date she was not yet Orthodox; she would be received into the Orthodox Church only three years later, in 1891. The relics were interred in the church in late January 1921, the obsequies served by the Patriarch of Jerusalem’s clergy together with the Russian community (orthodox.cn; Orthodox Church in America, “Grand Duchess Elizabeth,” which dates the translation to Jerusalem to 1920–1921 and the burial to the church of St. Mary Magdalene).

So the providential arc closed: the wish spoken at Gethsemane in 1888 was fulfilled in the same place thirty-three years later, after a death of unimaginable violence and a journey halfway around the earth. The shape of it was not lost on those who carried the relics or on those who afterward told the story; it is one of the reasons St. Elizabeth’s life is so often read as a single providential whole, the pilgrim of 1888 brought home to the place she had loved by way of the mine shaft of 1918. Beside the Grand Duchess was laid the nun Barbara, who had refused her freedom at Yekaterinburg to die with her abbess and now shared her grave as she had shared her martyrdom; the two are venerated together, and their relics have never been parted.

Fr. Seraphim Kuznetsov, having delivered the relics he had guarded across two continents, remained in the Holy Land. He had given years of his life to a single charge — to bring the bodies of the martyrs to a worthy grave — and having discharged it he lived out his days near the shrine he had made possible. He was himself buried, in time, in the southern corner of the same church grounds, between the fence and the outer altar wall, so that the custodian rests within sight of those he carried (orthodox.cn, “Sts Elizabeth, Barbara and the other Alapayevsk Martyrs”). His account of the translation of the relics remains one of the primary sources for the journey, and his name is inseparable from the history of the Gethsemane shrine.

References

“Sts Elizabeth, Barbara and the other Alapayevsk Martyrs.” orthodox.cn (Orthodox Church in China; the detailed itinerary of the relics through Hailar, Harbin, Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and on to Jerusalem, with Old/New Style dates) — drawing on the records of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission and Fr. Seraphim Kuznetsov’s account.
Kuznetsov, Hieromonk Seraphim. Pravoslavnyi tsar’-muchenik and his related account of the translation of the relics (the custodian’s own narrative, as transmitted in the mission records).
“The Final Journey of the Royal New Martyr Elizabeth (PHOTOS).” pravmir.com.
“Martyrs of Alapayevsk.” Wikipedia (Princess Victoria of Battenberg’s arrangement of the transfer to Jerusalem; the Chita waypoint).
Orthodox Church in America. “Grand Duchess Elizabeth.” Lives of the Saints, oca.org (the 1920–21 translation and burial at St. Mary Magdalene).
“Saint Elizabeth Feodorovna.” holynewmartyrs.org (the solemn reception of the relics at Jerusalem).