Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna

Princess Elisabeth (“Ella”) was created on November 1, 1864 in Bessungen, Hesse the other child and daughter of Princess Alice with the United Kingdom and Ludwig IV, Grand Duke of Hesse by Rhine (House of Hesse-Darmstadt).

She would have been a granddaughter of Great Britain’s, Queen Victoria plus an older sister of Alexandra, the very last Russian Empress.

Her siblings were Princess Victoria of Hesse and also Rhine, Princess Irene of Prussia, Grand Duke Ernest Louis of Hesse, and Empress Alexandra of Russia.

The children were raised within British and German cultures and were taught the Christian Commandments of fascination with God and fascination with their neighbor.

Marriage

Elisabeth was one from the most beautiful women in Europe. She married the Russian Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, your fifth son of Emperor Alexander II of Russia and Maria Alexandrovna (née Princess Marie of Hesse-Darmstadt) with the Chapel from the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg on June 15, 1884.

She then became generally known as Grand Duchess Yelizaveta Fyodorovna, or “Elisabeth Feodorovna” in English. It was at Elisabeth’s wedding that her younger sister, Princess Alix (Alexandra), met and fell deeply in love with Sergei’s nephew, Tsarevich Nicholas, her future husband and last Tsar of Russia.

The couple never had children of their very own, but they also became the foster parents of Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich and Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, Sergei’s niece and nephew when their mother died.

Conversion to Orthodoxy

Elizabeth changed into Russian Orthodoxy from her native Lutheran religion in 1891. From a letter to her father, Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse and Rhine (January 1, 1891) she stated: “I began to this decision (to convert to Orthodoxy) only on account of my deep faith. I feel that I should stand before God using a pure and faithful heart. How easy it may be for everything to be as it is now, and exactly how fake and hypocritical for the same time! How can I mislead everyone, pretend as a Protestant, and showing it by my appearance, while my soul has embraced the Orthodox faith? After I’ve spent six years in this particular country and already “found” religion.”

Assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich

Elisabeth’s happy life reached a sudden end on February 17, 1905 in the event the socialist revolutionary, Ivan Kalyayev, assassinated her husband in the Kremlin.

Grand Duke Sergei was returning in his carriage when Kalyayev got close and threw a bomb into his lap blowing him plus the carriage to bits inside the snow. When Elisabeth heard the explosion, she rushed outside and began collecting the dismembered remains of her husband.

After the death of her husband, Elisabeth’s high society life ended. She wore black mourning clothes, became a vegetarian and considered prayer and fasting.

Full of mercy, she visited Kaliaev in prison and gave him a Bible plus an icon and said, “Knowing the generous heart of my late husband, I forgive you”, and blessed the assassin. She even campaigned without results for him for being pardoned – Kalyayev was hanged on 23 May, 1905.

Monastery of Sts. Martha and Mary

In 1909 Elisabeth departed the Imperial Court, sold off her luxurious possessions and founded the Monastery of Sts. Martha and Mary (the sisters of Lazarus whom Jesus raised in the dead) in Moscow, dedicating her life to serving God by helping others. She became its abbess, making a new religious order for those women, regardless of their background or class. They established a hospital,a pharmacy, an orphanage along with a school plus they distributed free medicines to your poor and gave free choose to any person who reached their door.

Russian Revolution – 1917

The violent Russian Revolution of 1917 marked the end in the Romanov dynasty and centuries of Russian Imperial rule.

It began in the First World War, with all the February Revolution inside then-capital, Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), then spread throughout the Russian Empire concluding in 1923 with all the Bolshevik establishment in the Soviet Union.

Russia was the initial country to declare itself socialist and move towards a communist society. Leftist leader, Vladimir Lenin who seized power, paved how for the Soviet Union having its authoritarian, single party regimes. Communism inside 20th century became a terrifying, influential force around the globe, setting the stage with the Cold War starting in 1947, involving the Soviet Union along with the capitalist, United States in addition to their respective allies.

The Cold War ended while using dissolution from the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991.

Fate with the Imperial Family and Elisabeth Feodorovna

Vladimir Lenin ordered the Cheka (secret police) to arrest Elisabeth and exiled her first to Perm, then to Yekaterinburg along using the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich; Princes Ioann Konstantinovich, Konstantin Konstantinovich, Igor Konstantinovich and Vladimir Pavlovich Paley; Grand Duke Sergei’s secretary, Fyodor Remez and Varvara Yakovleva, a sister on the Grand Duchess’s convent who had refused to depart her Abbess.

Then, we were holding all delivered to Alapayevsk on 20 May 1918 and housed inside Napolnaya School within the outskirts in the town.

At noon on 17 July, Cheka officer Pyotr Startsev arrived and took through the prisoners whatever money that they had left and transferred them to your Upper Siniachikhensky factory compound. That night the prisoners were awakened and driven in carts for the village of Siniachikha, 18 kilometers (11 miles) from Alapayevsk high was an abandoned iron mine having a pit, 20 meters (66 feet) deep.

Here the Cheka violently beat every one of the prisoners before throwing them into this pit. As the executioners pushed Mother Elisabeth to the pit, she said: “Father, forgive them, for they just don’t know what these are doing” (Luke 23:34).

The victims began singing Orthodox hymns and so the Cheka hurled hand grenades along the shaft killing only Fyodor Remez. Then, they shoved into your pit a substantial quantity of brushwood and hang up it alight.

The White Army

On October 8, 1918, the Russian anti-Bolshevik, White Army recaptured this area from your pro-communist, Red Army and came throughout the pit along with the bodies of Elisabeth and her companions. She was 53 years of age. The day before Elisabeth and her companions were thrown in to the pit to die, the Tsar, Nicholas II, her sister the Empress, and children were all brutally murdered by way of a firing squad.

Elisabeth’s remains were initially buried from the cemetery with the Russian Orthodox Church of St. Seraphim of Sarov, in present-day Beijing in China and later on were moved towards the Church of Maria Magdalene in Jerusalem within the Mount of Olives which she and her husband had helped to develop.

Holy Martyr Elisabeth Feodorovna

In 1981, Elisabeth was canonized from the anti-Soviet, Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and also the Moscow Patriarchate in 1992 as Holy Martyr Elizabeth Feodorovna following the fall on the communist, Soviet Union. Sister, Varvara Yakovleva who refused to go out of the side of her abbess, Elisabeth Feodorovna had also been canonized.

Holy Martyr Elisabeth Feodorovna is one on the ten 20th-century martyrs from throughout the world who will be depicted in statues over the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey in London. Her Feast Day is well known on July 5 (she was martyred on July 18, according to your New Calendar, which had been July 5 around the Old Calendar).