Jerusalem: The Biography

* Jerusalem was still filled with White Russians but one Grand Duchess returned post-humously. In 1918, the widow of Grand Duke Sergei, Ella, who had become a nun, was arrested by the Bolsheviks. Her skull was smashed in and she was tossed down a mineshaft in Alapaevsk, just hours after the Bolsheviks had also murdered her sister, Empress Alexandra, Emperor Nicholas II and all their children. When the Whites took Alapaevsk, they discovered the bodies: Ella’s had scarcely decayed. Her body and that of her devoted fellow nun Sister Barbara travelled via Peking, Bombay and Port Said to Jerusalem where they were received in January 1921 by Sir Harry Luke who had to change their route through the city to avoid pro-Bolshevik protests by Jewish immigrants. ‘Two unadorned coffins were lifted from the train. The little cavalcade wound its way sadly, unobtrusively to the Olivet’, wrote Louis, Marquess of Milford Haven who, with his wife Victoria, helped bear the coffins. ‘Russian peasant women, stranded pilgrims, sobbing and moaning, were almost fighting to get some part of the coffin.’ The Milford Havens were the grandparents of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Elizabeth the New Martyr was canonized and rests in a glass-topped white marble sarcophagus in the Church of Mary Magdalene she and her husband had built. Some of her saintly relics have been returned to her Martha and Mary Convent in Moscow.