On September 26, in the outskirts of Moscow, there will be held a prayerful procession in commemoration of Grand-Duchess St. Elizabeth.

She was born a German princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, raised at the Court of Queen Victoria of Britain, became a woman of an exceptional beauty, got married to Grand-Duke Sergei of Russia, and spent fifteen years in Moscow, only to behold her beloved husband torn apart by a terrorist’s bomb.

She never remarried. She founded a convent in Moscow and became a nun there, being hated by all who did not know her – because she was German, because she was beautiful, because she was pure, because she was humble – and yet she was more ardently loved by all who knew her and called her White Angel, as she, wearing a light colored habit, tended to the poor and sick.

On a summer day in 1918, she was buried alive in an abandoned mine by the Bolshevist descendants of her husband’s assassins, and as the exhumation by the White forces indicated, she had been tending to those buried next to her up until the moment of her death. On the previous day in Ekaterinburg, just a few hundred miles away, the Russian Royal Family was murdered, including her sister — St. Alexandra the Empress.

This procession marks the 130^th anniversary of St. Elizabeth, a devoted Lutheran who converted to Holy Orthodoxy. It will be coupled with the fund-raising campaign, White Flower, for the benefit of families with disabled and gravely sick children.