Moscow's White Angel

July marks 100 years since Moscow lost its White Angel, the affectionate moniker given to the woman born Elizabeth Alexandra Louise Alice of Hesse-Darmstadt on November 1, 1864, in Darmstadt. Better known in her adopted homeland as Grand Duchess Yelizaveta Fyodorovna, she was the sister of Empress Alexandra (Tsar Nicholas II’s wife) and granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria. Her intelligence, beauty, and selflessness earned Elizabeth veneration in Russia.

Her parents were Victoria’s daughter, Princess Alice, and Ludwig IV, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine. Her mother instilled in “Ella” the ability to empathize with the suffering of others and a drive to help ease that suffering. This would ultimately become her life’s mission.

Courted by Europe’s most eligible royal bachelors, she chose to wed Alexander II’s son, Grand Duke Sergei, who would later serve as governor general of Moscow. Several years after their marriage, Yelizaveta converted to Russian Orthodoxy.

In February 1905, the course of her life was radically altered when her husband was killed by a terrorist’s bomb while near or in his carriage. Elizabeth picked up what was left of his body with her own hands. From that day forward, she exchanged a life of opulence for one of self-sacrifice and charity.

Using her own money, she purchased land on Bolshaya Ordynskaya Street and, in 1909, established the Martha and Mary Convent of Mercy, where the wounded and infirm – soldiers, the poor, and orphans – could receive medical care. Elizabeth played a hands-on role in this endeavor, assisting in surgeries and dressing wounds. She was reputed to sleep no more than two to three hours a night, so devoted was she to her work.

After the October Revolution, all members of the royal family still in Bolshevik-controlled territory were imprisoned. The day after the tsar and his family were murdered, a group of Latvian Riflemen who had sided with the Bolsheviks came to take her from the convent and subsequently transported her to Alapayevsk, in Sverdlovsk Oblast.

Before dawn on July 18, 1918, Elizabeth, her fellow nun Varvara, and five other Romanovs were thrown into the shaft of an abandoned mine. Elizabeth endured what must have been a slow and painful death brought on by a combination of the fall into the shaft, grenades hurled in after them, fire, and starvation.

For a time, the White Army took over Alapayevsk, and Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Victoria, ultimately managed to arrange to have her remains brought to Jerusalem, where she was laid to rest in the Church of Mary Magdalene.

She has been canonized by both the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (in 1981) and by the Moscow Patriarchate (in 1992). RL