Barbara

Nun Barbara (secular name Varvara Alexeyevna Yakovleva) was a Russian Orthodox sister of mercy and one of the New Martyrs of the twentieth century. Almost nothing securely documented survives about her parentage, childhood, or the exact place and date of her birth. She belonged to the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is known to history through her vocation at the Martha and Mary Convent of Mercy in Moscow and through her death with Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna. Orthodox notices often assign her birth to about 1880, but that year is conventional rather than firmly established from contemporary records.

The Martha and Mary Convent was founded by Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, a princess of Hesse who had married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, embraced Russian Orthodoxy, and, after her husband’s assassination in 1905, turned to religious life and charity. The house, opened in 1909 on Bolshaya Ordynka in Moscow, joined a monastic rule to active nursing and relief among the city’s poor and sick; its sisters wore a grey habit and white wimple. Varvara Yakovleva entered this community and became the Grand Duchess’s cell-attendant, remaining constantly at her side. Accounts from the convent describe her as humble, obedient, and wholly devoted to her abbess.

The First World War and the revolutions of 1917 ended the convent’s public work, and Bolshevik authorities suppressed the community. In 1918 Elizabeth Feodorovna was arrested. Sister Barbara was not required to share that imprisonment; she chose to accompany her abbess. The two women were moved eastward with a small group of Romanov relatives—including Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, Princes Ioann, Konstantin and Igor Konstantinovich, and Prince Vladimir Paley—and the Grand Duke’s secretary, Fyodor Remez. They were confined at Alapayevsk in the Urals. During the night of 17–18 July 1918 local Bolsheviks took the prisoners into the forest, beat them, and cast them alive down an abandoned mine shaft, afterwards throwing in grenades. Later investigations recorded that singing of hymns had been heard from the pit. All of the victims died of injuries, exposure, or asphyxia.

When anti-Bolshevik forces occupied the district later in 1918, the bodies were recovered and identified. The remains of Grand Duchess Elizabeth and Nun Barbara were carried across Siberia into China, rested for a time at the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing, and were then brought to the Holy Land. In 1921 they were interred in the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene at Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, a Russian church consecrated in 1888 with which Elizabeth Feodorovna had been closely connected and where she had wished to be buried. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified Nun Barbara as a new martyr in 1981; the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church added her to its calendar in 1992. She is commemorated on 5 July according to the Julian calendar (18 July on the Gregorian calendar), together with Grand Duchess Elizabeth. Her principal relics remain in Jerusalem.