The Life
Who She Was Elizabeth was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, the sister of Empress Alexandra of Russia, a German princess who converted to Orthodoxy after her marriage to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. In 1905 Sergei was assassinated by a revolutionary's bomb. Elizabeth went to the prison to forgive the assassin. She sold her jewelry, gave away her property, and founded the Martha-Mary Convent of Mercy in Moscow -- not an ordinary monastery but a community combining the monastic life with active service to the poor. When the Bolsheviks came to power she refused to leave Russia, though evacuation was offered. She was arrested in 1918 and taken to Alapayevsk. On July 18, 1918 -- the day after the Romanov family was shot in Yekaterinburg -- she and several companions were thrown alive into an abandoned mine shaft. Her body was recovered months later by the White Army. Witnesses said she had bound her wounds with strips of her own clothing and continued to pray after the fall. She was still alive for several days.