NEWS FEATURE: In Russia, a New Monastery for a New Saint

c. 2000 Religion News Service ALAPAYEVSK, Russia _ Four gut-wrenching hours of bus travel north of Yekaterinburg, on the outskirts of this small, sleepy city, a group of monks and novices is constructing a monastery to mark the death of Grand Princess Yelizaveta Fyodorovna, one of Orthodoxy’s newest saints. In comparison to her relative who […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

ALAPAYEVSK, Russia _ Four gut-wrenching hours of bus travel north of Yekaterinburg, on the outskirts of this small, sleepy city, a group of monks and novices is constructing a monastery to mark the death of Grand Princess Yelizaveta Fyodorovna, one of Orthodoxy’s newest saints.

In comparison to her relative who is likely to be canonized later this month _ the bloody bungler and last czar Nicholas II _ the grand princess is little known, uncontroversial and led a life that was almost certainly more saintly.


Construction of the Russian Orthodox monastery here is moving slowly in a pine grove on the edge of a collective farm. The five monks and 20 novices laboring on the project are battling hosts of fat, slow-moving mosquitoes in the summer, and in the winter endure temperatures of 104 degrees below zero without central heating or indoor plumbing.

Donations trickle in. Government officials in the impoverished region are in no position to help, even if they wanted to.

In contrast, Russian Orthodox Church leaders and regional politicians in Yekaterinburg are working closely together on a $12 million religious complex on the site of the last czar’s execution by Bolsheviks in July 1918.

That same month here in Alapayevsk, a Bolshevik squad threw Fyodorovna and others into a pit and hurled grenades after them.

Marked by a simple wooden Orthodox cross and a sign warning visitors not to venture into it for danger of collapse, the shaft is now the centerpiece of the Monastery of the Newly Martyred Russians.

The monastery’s Abbott Moses, a quiet, hoarse-voiced man of 30, speaks with a sense of awe about the miraculous pit. Standing a few meters from it on a recent weekday, Moses, who doesn’t use his last name, told of how when Fyodorovna’s body was taken from the shaft a few months after her death, singing was heard and an unexploded grenade was found next to her still-intact body.

Nowadays, the pit is the source of an equally miraculous phenomenon.

“There have been a few cases where a sweet smell has come out of the shaft,” said Moses, who has deep-set blue eyes, freckles and a wispy red beard. “In May of ’98, for a few days around the birthday of the last czar himself, it happened. I came by, smelled it, and thought, `Oh, it’s spring and there are flowers.’ But there were no flowers.”


Although Alapayevsk is off the beaten track and boasts only one genuine tourist attraction _ the childhood home of 19th century composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky _ Moses said first dozens and now hundreds of pilgrims have been journeying to the Monastery of the Newly Martyred Russians since it was founded in 1995.

Pilgrims, who come from as far away as Brazil, often include descendants of Russians who fled the Communists and occasionally consist of Romanov kin from the United States, France and Spain.

“A lot of people here think the West just wishes evil on us. I don’t support this idea,” said Moses, watching with a hint of a smile as a visitor alternated between taking notes and swatting mosquitoes. “I think there are many in the West who would like to help us.”

As a German-born Protestant, Fyodorovna spanned East and West. Born in 1864, she converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 1891 after marrying Grand Prince Sergei Aleksandrovich Romanov. While serving as governor of Moscow, the prince was assassinated in 1905, widowing Fyodorovna, who petitioned the czar to pardon the assassin.

She became increasingly pious, founding a convent in Moscow and devoting herself to charitable works. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks arrested her, eventually taking her here and killing her.

Fyodorovna was canonized only after the 1991 fall of the Communist government because the Soviets had effectively prevented the Russian Orthodox Church from doing so earlier. Today, the convent she started is under reconstruction in central Moscow and she, as a saint, is increasingly venerated.


However, judging from icon sales in Moscow churches, her popularity is nothing like that of Czar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children, who are set to be canonized at the Russian Orthodox Church’s Council of Bishops convening Aug. 13-20.

Fyodorovna does, however, seem to be more accessible to non-Orthodox Christians. Sister Lucy Ann Warsinger, 79, of Fond du Lac, Wis., is a 79-year-old Roman Catholic nun living in Chelyabinsk, in the foothills of Russia’s Ural Mountains south of Alapayevsk.

“I feel so close to that woman,” Warsinger said in a recent telephone interview from Chelyabinsk. “First of all, she had a down-to-earth human spirituality. And then, she had a great concern for the poor of the world, and also woman’s equality at a time when no one was talking about it.”

In November, Warsinger and others from her order, the Congregation of St. Agnes, will travel to Jerusalem where Fyodorovna’s remains were brought from the Soviet Union after her death.

“I hope to pray at her shrine,” said Warsinger, adding that she often relates the story of Fyodorovna to the young Russian Catholics with whom she works. “When I talk about St. Yelizaveta of Moscow, they warm up. She is their own.”

DEA END RNS

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