The figures come from St. Andrew the Apostle's Foundation, which had arranged this unprecedented journey across all Russian Orthodox Church dioceses.
The relics will be brought to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Moscow's principal shrine, late in the afternoon February 21, Monday next. Leading the ceremony will be Alexis II the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia-Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church.
On February 28, the relics will be taken back to Jerusalem, where they have been preserved since 1921in a convent of the Russian Church in Exile.
Born in Germany, 1864, Grand Duchess Elizabeth was granddaughter of renowned Queen Victoria, and sister of Alexandra, Russia's last Empress. As she gave her hand in marriage to Grand Duke Sergius, uncle of Emperor Nicholas II, Elizabeth converted to Russian Orthodoxy from her Protestant denomination.
Revolutionary terrorist Ivan Kalyaev (1877-1905) assassinated the Grand Duke in the Kremlin, 1905. Soul of Christian forgiveness, the widow visited her husband's murderer in prison and even applied to the Czar for his pardon. Her intercession was dismissed, however, and the terrorist met his death on the gallows.
Elizabeth took the veil to become founding Mother Superior of Sts. Martha and Mary's Convent in Moscow, unforgettable for charitable works. The nuns attended to the sick and helped the poor. Mother Elizabeth was dedicatedly sharing all their chores.
She had a chance to emigrate after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 but refused to leave her adoptive country in its plight. Elizabeth and Sister Barbara, her assistant, were arrested in the spring of 1918. They met their martyrdom, July 18. Cruelly battered, the nuns were kicked alive down a coal mine near Alapayevsk in the South Urals.
The relics of Sts. Elizabeth and Barbara first appeared in Moscow, July 25, 2004, to travel across Russia from the Pacific coast to Kaliningrad on the Baltic coast. Pious Christians also bowed to the martyrs in Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.
The delivery of the holy relics to Russia came as a maiden joint action by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Church Outside Russia, or RCOR.
