St. Elizabeth and the Alapaevsk Martyrs

The Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna — sister of the Empress Alexandra, widow of the Grand Duke Sergei, and, after his assassination, foundress and abbess of the Martha and Mary Convent in Moscow — and the members of the House of Romanov and their companions murdered with her at Alapaevsk on the night after the Ekaterinburg killings, thrown alive into a mine shaft. This file summarizes her place in the category and the Alapaevsk killings, deferring the full account of her life to her own collection.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Nun of the Imperial House

Among the noble New Martyrs, St. Elizabeth Feodorovna (Grand Duchess Elizabeth, 1864–1918) holds a place apart, because unlike the imperial family her sanctity has a straightforwardly religious ground and her death a clearer claim to the martyr’s category. A German princess of Hesse and a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she married the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, brother of Tsar Alexander III, converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy out of conviction, and, after Sergei was assassinated by a revolutionary’s bomb in 1905 — after which she famously visited his killer in prison and forgave him — gave away her possessions, left court life, and founded the Martha and Mary Convent of Mercy in Moscow, a community of nun-sisters devoted to prayer and to nursing and serving the poor, over which she presided as abbess. Her full life — her conversion, her widowhood and forgiveness of the assassin, her monastic foundation and its distinctive rule of active mercy — is treated in her own dedicated collection and is not retold here (see St. Elizabeth the New Martyr). What concerns this file is her death, and the killings at Alapaevsk of which she was the chief.

The Killings at Alapaevsk

Elizabeth was arrested by the Bolsheviks in 1918 and, with other members and connections of the imperial house, taken east to the Urals — to the small town of Alapaevsk, not far from Ekaterinburg. There, on the night of 17/18 July 1918 — the night immediately after the shooting of the imperial family at Ekaterinburg — she and her companions were killed. The group comprised, besides the Grand Duchess Elizabeth: the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich; three young princes of the Romanov house, the sons of the Grand Duke Konstantin (John, Constantine, and Igor); Prince Vladimir Paley; and Elizabeth’s faithful convent sister and companion, the nun Barbara (Varvara) Yakovleva, who had chosen to remain with her mistress to the end. Rather than being shot, most of the victims were thrown alive down a disused mine shaft, into which grenades were then flung; those not killed by the fall or the explosions died slowly of their injuries, hunger, and cold at the bottom of the pit. When the shaft was later opened by White forces who took the region, the bodies were recovered; the testimony that the victims had sung hymns from within the shaft after they were thrown down, and that Elizabeth had bound the wounds of a fellow victim with her own clothing, comes from these later accounts and is reported as part of the tradition of her martyrdom (the Alapaevsk killings and the recovery of the bodies are treated in full, with their sources, in the dedicated collection St. Elizabeth the New Martyr; the account here is a summary).

After the recovery of her body, Elizabeth’s remains were eventually taken — by a long journey through China — to Jerusalem, and interred in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives, in fulfilment of a wish she had expressed on a pilgrimage there, where they remain a place of veneration (the translation of her relics to Jerusalem is documented in her own collection).

Her Category and Glorification

Elizabeth’s case sits more comfortably under the martyr’s category than the imperial family’s, and her glorification history reflects this. Because she had become a nun and abbess and died as a consecrated religious of the Church, and because her whole later life was an explicit dedication to Christ, her death at the hands of the anti-Christian revolution has been read as a martyrdom in a fuller sense than the tsar’s — though she too, killed as a Romanov, shares in the dynastic ground of the Alapaevsk murders. She and the nun Barbara were among the New Martyrs glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1981, and by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1992 (in Elizabeth’s and Barbara’s case the Moscow Patriarchate glorified them as New Martyrs, distinct from the passion-bearer designation later given to the imperial family in 2000) (on the two glorifications and the category differences, see The Glorifications: Methodology; the detail of her glorification is in St. Elizabeth the New Martyr). She is among the ten twentieth-century martyrs from around the world commemorated in statue above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey in London, a mark of veneration reaching beyond the Orthodox world.

Her Place in the Category

St. Elizabeth and the Alapaevsk martyrs form a bridge between the two faces of the noble martyrdom. Like the imperial family, they died because of who they were — Romanovs whom the revolution wished to eliminate — and their killing was, in that sense, dynastic. But in Elizabeth herself, and in her companion Barbara, the martyrdom has the added and clearer dimension of consecrated religious life laid down in fidelity to Christ, together with the Christ-like forgiveness that had marked her since she pardoned her husband’s assassin. She is venerated across the Orthodox world, and beyond it, as one of the most luminous of the New Martyrs. The full account of her life, her convent, her death, and her cult is given in her own collection, to which the reader is directed (see St. Elizabeth the New Martyr).

See Also

References

  • The full documentary sourcing on St. Elizabeth’s life, the Martha and Mary Convent, the Alapaevsk killings, the recovery and translation of her relics, and her glorifications, is carried in the dedicated collection St. Elizabeth the New Martyr.
  • Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018. (The glorifications of the noble martyrs and the category distinctions.)