The Church on the Blood and the Feast

The concrete forms of veneration at Ekaterinburg and in the calendar. The Ipatiev House, where the family died, was demolished in 1977; on its site the Church on the Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land was consecrated in 2003. A monastery rose at Ganina Yama, where the bodies were first taken. The Royal Passion-Bearers are commemorated on 4/17 July, and each year the “Tsar’s Days” draw great crowds to an all-night vigil and a procession from the Church on the Blood to Ganina Yama. This file describes these sites and observances and their history.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / ROCOR

The Ipatiev House and Its Demolition

The house of the engineer Nikolai Ipatiev, requisitioned as the “House of Special Purpose,” was the place of the killing (see The Murder of 16–17 July 1918). For decades it stood in Sverdlovsk (as Ekaterinburg was renamed under the Soviets), an awkward relic that drew quiet pilgrims. In 1977 it was demolished on the orders of the Soviet authorities — a decision associated with Boris Yeltsin, then First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional party committee, who later wrote that the order came from the Politburo and that he carried it out (Yeltsin, Against the Grain, 1990; the demolition is discussed in Slater, The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II, 2007). The razing was meant to prevent the site from becoming a shrine; it had the opposite long-term effect.

The Church on the Blood, Consecrated 2003

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the site was given to the Church, and a large church was built over it: the Church on the Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land (Храм-на-Крови во имя Всех святых, в земле Российской просиявших), consecrated on 16 July 2003 (Slater, The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II, 2007; the consecration is widely documented). Its dedication is itself instructive: the church commemorates not the Tsar alone but all the saints of the Russian land, embedding the Royal Passion-Bearers within the whole company of Russian holiness — a framing consonant with the Church’s insistence that they belong among the New Martyrs, not above them (see The Royal Martyrs in Context). The lower church marks the approximate location of the room where the family died.

Ganina Yama

At Ganina Yama, the abandoned mine in the Koptyaki forest to which the bodies were first taken (see The Murder of 16–17 July 1918), the Church established the Monastery of the Holy Royal Passion-Bearers around 2000, with a cluster of wooden churches arranged around the mine shaft (Slater, The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II, 2007). Ganina Yama’s prominence as a shrine is bound up with the Sokolov tradition that the bodies were destroyed there — a tradition that, as noted, is in tension with the Porosenkov Log remains that the Church has not recognized (see Why the Remains Remain Contested). The two Ekaterinburg-area shrines — the Church on the Blood at the death site and the monastery at the first disposal site — anchor the veneration independently of the disputed relics.

The Feast: 4/17 July

The Royal Passion-Bearers are commemorated on 4 July (Old Style) / 17 July (New Style), the anniversary of the killing (report of Metropolitan Yuvenaly, 2000, and the liturgical calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church). They are also commemorated collectively within the feast of the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, kept on a Sunday near 25 January (Old Style), the commemoration established for the whole host of Soviet-era martyrs (see The Royal Martyrs in Context). The 4/17 July feast is the family’s proper commemoration and the focus of the Ekaterinburg pilgrimage.

The “Tsar’s Days” and the Night Procession

Each July, the anniversary draws a great pilgrimage to Ekaterinburg known as the Tsar’s Days (Царские дни). Its center is an all-night Divine Liturgy at the Church on the Blood on the night of 16–17 July, followed at dawn by a procession (крестный ход) of many thousands of pilgrims — in some years reported in the tens of thousands — on foot the roughly twenty kilometers from the Church on the Blood to the monastery at Ganina Yama, retracing the route the bodies were taken (Slater, The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II, 2007; the annual procession is regularly reported in Russian Church media). The scale of the pilgrimage is one measure of the depth of the popular veneration — and, as Section 06 cautions, also a setting in which the tsarebozhie current is visible and in which the Church’s task of catechizing the veneration is concretely at work (see Veneration versus Cult-Excess).

Iconography

The Royal Passion-Bearers are depicted in icons, both individually (Nicholas and Alexandra) and as the family group of seven, typically in imperial or simple dress bearing crosses, sometimes gathered beneath Christ or the Theotokos. As with the hymnography, the iconography ranges from the soberly ecclesial to productions with strongly monarchist framing that critics associate with the tsarebozhie tendency — a range noted, without a text-by-text adjudication, in Veneration versus Cult-Excess. The controlling point is that the licensed veneration honors passion-bearers, and the imagery is rightly read in that key.

See Also

References

  • Slater, Wendy. The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II: Relics, Remains and the Romanovs. London: Routledge, 2007. (The demolition of the Ipatiev House; the Church on the Blood; Ganina Yama; the pilgrimage.)
  • Yeltsin, Boris. Against the Grain: An Autobiography. Trans. Michael Glenny. New York: Summit Books, 1990. (Yeltsin’s account of carrying out the 1977 demolition on Politburo orders.)
  • Report of Metropolitan Yuvenaly of Krutitsy and Kolomna to the Jubilee Bishops’ Council, Moscow, August 2000. (The glorification and the commemoration.)
  • Liturgical calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church (commemoration of the Royal Passion-Bearers, 4/17 July; the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia).