IVANOVO BOWS TO MARTYRED GRAND DUCHESS' RELICS

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MOSCOW, February 9 (RIA Novosti) - The relics of holy martyrs Grand Duchess Elizabeth and Sister Barbara have been brought to Ivanovo, provincial and textile industrial center 300 kilometers northeast of Moscow. More than five thousand gathered for a religious procession, led by Archbishop Ambrose of Ivanovo-Voznesensk and Kineshma. The procession accompanied the relics from the railway terminal to the Transfiguration Cathedral along Friedrich Engels Street, the city's main thoroughfare.

The information reached Novosti from St. Andrew the Apostle's Foundation, which arranged relics transportation to many dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church.

"We firmly believe that the presence of the relics of Grand Duchess Elizabeth and her dedicated friend Sister Barbara will bring heavenly blessing to this city and the entire Ivanovo land," Archbishop Ambrose said at the railway station as he was receiving the relic-cases from Michael the Archbishop of Boston.

The relics of Sts. Elizabeth and Barbara have been preserved at one of the convents of the Russian Church in Exile since 1921. They were brought to Moscow, for a first-ever time, last July. Since then, the sacred relics have crossed entire Russia, east to west, the post-Soviet Baltic countries, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Archbishop Michael always accompanies the relics.

Born in Germany, 1864, Elizabeth was daughter of Louis IV the Archduke of Hesse-Darmstadt. She was granddaughter of renowned Queen Victoria, and sister of Alexandra, Russia's last Empress. After Elizabeth gave her hand in wedding to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, uncle of Nicholas II, she converted to Russian Orthodoxy to give up the Lutheran denomination in which she had been brought up.

Elizabeth took the veil after her husband died a violent death, of terrorist hand, to become founding Mother Superior of Sts. Martha and Mary's Convent in Moscow, which was famous for charity. She staunchly refused to leave Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, and was arrested in spring 1918. Sister Barbara, the abbess' helper on her charitable cause, never left her side. The nuns met a heinous death, July 18, 1918. Horribly battered, they were kicked alive down the Nizhne-Selimsky coal mine in the vicinity of Alapayevsk in the Urals.

The Russian Church in Exile canonized Mother Elizabeth and Sister Barbara in 1981, and the Russian Orthodox Church in 1992.

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