A symbol to human love, but also one of fidelity to Divine Love.

Blood on the Red Star: 

The Martyrdom of Grand Duchess Elizabeth

By K. V. Turley

Described at the time as the most beautiful woman in Europe, this is the story of a princess who was to know both public adulation and private sorrow before spending her last days in the service of the sick and the poor wearing the plain garb of a nun. Having been born into privilege and lived in unimaginable splendor, her end was to come in an industrial wasteland as a martyr to her faith.

Her Grand Ducal Highness Princess Elisabeth was born on November 1, 1864. She had been named after St. Elizabeth of Hungary, a distant ancestor. Ella, as she was to be known, was the second child of the Royal House of Hesse, a minor Germanic principality. Her upbringing was conventional for one of such rank; charming and bright, she was also beautiful. Suitors were proposed or came hoping for marriage. The future Kaiser Wilhelm II was one such, only to be met with a firm if polite “nein.” Then, there came from the East two brothers, sons of the Russian Tsar, and it was to one of these, Sergei, she was drawn: an intense artistic and spiritual kinship grew—soon her heart was won.

Thereafter, Ella was to leave home and family for a distant land and a formidable dynasty: Imperial Russia and the Romanovs. The couple were married on June 15, 1884, at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg; and, in so doing, she entered a world nothing could have prepared her for. With political and social systems markedly different from those in Germany, the Romanovs ruled Russia and her vast empire as absolute monarchs, as they had done so for nearly 300 years, but, unbeknownst to all, they were now entering their twilight.

Initially, Sergei and his new bride were enveloped into life at court, with all its petty rivalries and dubious charms, but theirs was to be a love set apart, one based primarily on a shared and deep Christian faith. Nevertheless, for her first years of marriage, Ella lived in an aristocratic world that knew only great wealth and power, decadence and dissipation, and even greater mismanagement of those it claimed to serve. Inevitably, age-old resentments started to build within a restless empire.

There was one occasion, from those early years, that was both telling and significant, occurring in 1888, when the young couple represented the Russian Royal House at the dedication of the church of St. Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives. There, whilst priests intoned prayers and incensed icons, in the very center of the Holy Land, Ella felt the first stirrings of her heart away from the Lutheranism of her birth. As it turned out, this visit to Jerusalem and the Holy Places impressed both greatly, but Ella in particular. Although always a devout Christian, her faith began to deepen from this time. An intense period of prayer and study followed, eventually leading to the Orthodox faith of her husband. But, for now, leaving the tranquility of Jerusalem, the couple made their way back to Russia and to another city, if one far from peace.

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