The Last Imperial Family
Nicholas II succeeded to the Russian throne in 1894 and married Alexandra Feodorovna, born Princess Alix of Hesse, in November of that year. Their household grew with the birth of four daughters and, in 1904, a son and heir, Alexei, whose hemophilia was a constant private concern of his parents.
Nicholas reigned through a period of revolution and war. After the February Revolution he abdicated on 15 March 1917, and the family passed into the custody of the new authorities, ending the Romanov dynasty's long rule over Russia.
A Marriage of Rare Devotion
Nicholas had set his heart on Alix of Hesse — a granddaughter of Queen Victoria — years before he was able to marry her, confiding the hope to his diary as early as 1891. When he proposed at Coburg in April 1894 she at first refused, unwilling in conscience to leave the Lutheranism of her upbringing for Orthodoxy; won over in part by her sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth, who had herself already converted, she accepted, and the two were betrothed that same month. She was received into the Orthodox Church as Alexandra Feodorovna the day after the death of Nicholas's father, Alexander III, and they were married a week later, on 26 November 1894.
Theirs proved an unusually close and affectionate marriage — a genuine love match rather than a dynastic arrangement — and it remained so through more than two decades of reign, revolution, and captivity. Whenever they were apart, above all during the First World War when Nicholas was often away at military headquarters, they wrote to one another almost daily, for the most part in English; close to seventeen hundred of their letters and telegrams survive from the war years alone. That correspondence, tender and unguarded, is among the fullest records any royal couple has left of their love for one another.
Captivity and Death
From the abdication onward the family was confined under guard, moved from Tsarskoye Selo to Tobolsk and at last to Yekaterinburg. The Orthodox Church holds up their conduct throughout this period — their patience and lack of bitterness — as the heart of their sanctity.
On the night of 17 July 1918 they were awakened and ordered to dress for travel, then led down to a cellar room of the Ipatiev House. There the death sentence was read and the family was shot. According to the account preserved by the Orthodox Church in America, Nicholas and Alexandra died at once under the gunfire, but the children did not die immediately and were killed with further violence. The bodies were carried off, despoiled, and disposed of in an abandoned mine in an attempt to obliterate all trace of them.
The remains of the imperial family were located and reburied in 1998, the year before the wider Russian Church proceeded to their glorification.
Passion-bearers
The Church classes Nicholas and his family as passion-bearers rather than as martyrs in the strict sense. The distinction is that they did not die for an explicit confession of Christ but bore suffering and death in imitation of Him, without resistance. In practice they are nonetheless frequently called martyrs in Church publications, icons, and popular devotion, and ROCOR formally numbered them among the New Martyrs of Russia.
Their glorification came in two stages: the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia glorified them in 1981, and the Moscow Patriarchate canonized them on 15 August 2000 after an extended study of the question. The family's servants who died with them, including the court physician Eugene Botkin — himself later canonized as a righteous passion-bearer in 2016 — are remembered alongside them.
Relics & Shrines
The Church on the Blood was raised on the site of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, with its altar standing over the place of the execution. The site is a center of pilgrimage to the Royal Passion-bearers.
