The Life of St. Elizabeth…

The Holy Royal Saint Elizabeth Fedorovna Romanov’s whole life was an ascent to sainthood. Born Lutheran, St. Elizabeth converted willingly to Orthodox Christianity later in life. In her young years she was acquainted with sorrows, her three-year-old brother death and the outbreak of the diphtheria epidemic claiming the lives of her four-year-old sister and her mother. She learned to pray through this and accept her Cross.
Marrying Sergey Romanov, nephew of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, she moved to Russia. Her husband died in a bomb attack at the hands of a radical revolutionary. She visited the assassin in prison, leaving in his cell the Gospel and an icon, forgiving Kalyaev, asking the Russian Tsar for clemency towards him. Abandoning her social life, she devoted herself to the service of God and Church, purchasing a house and land in Moscow to establish the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent. A relief on the Convent’s Church of the Protection shows two angels, representing St. Elizabeth and her late husband. “I am in heaven with Sergey,” she explained, meaning that her husband’s death had moved her to another world.
The convent cared for the earthly needs of the needy while also perusing religious ministry among them. Considering work to be the basis of religious life and prayer its reward, she concentrated on the needs of the poorest and most disadvantaged by establishing a school, hospital, and orphanage for the residence of Khitrovka, one of Moscow’s most troubled suburbs. She soon extended the Convent’s ministry to widows, wounded soldiers, and the unemployed of Moscow.
During the time of atheistic social revolution, her humility was so powerful she managed to pacify ardent revolutionaries. Even so, she and two of the sisters, Varvara Yakovleva and Ekaterina Yanysheva, were taken to prison where they spent their time in prayer.
St. Elizabeth would eventually be thrown into a pit with other members of the royal family, meanwhile she prayed for those who harmed her family, “Lord, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23; 34). The executioners proceeded to throw hand grenades to kill them. After this, she comforted the wounded family until their deaths, and eyewitnesses heard the chanting of the Cherubic Hymn for hours.
Her relics were taken to the Holy Land and buried at the church of St. Mary Magdalene. In 1992, the Reverend Martyer Grand Duchess Elizabeth and Nun Barbara were glorified by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Pictures above and below curtesy of, and text summarized from, St. Elisabeth Convent Website (external site).