My favorite historical women - Alexandra Feodorovna. ( 2 / 30 )
Alexandra Feodorovna was born Victoria Alix Helena Louise Beatrice on June 6, 1872, in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, in the German Empire. The sixth child of Grand Duke Louis IV and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, she was called Alix by her family. Her mother died when she was six and she spent most of her holidays with her British cousins. She was educated by her grandmother, Queen Victoria, and later studied philosophy at Heidelberg University.
Alix met Grand Duke Nicholas Romanov, heir to the Russian throne, when she was twelve. Over the years, the acquaintance blossomed into a romance. At first, the prospect of marriage didn’t seem very promising. Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, was anti-German and Alix’s family expressed open disdain for the Russian people. Further, it was suspected she carried the hereditary disease of hemophilia, considered fatal at the time. But they were deeply in love and on November 26, 1894, the couple wed. Alix took the name Alexandra Feodorovna when she was accepted into the Russian Orthodox Church.
On the surface, the two enjoyed a warm and passionate marriage, living at Tsarskoe Selo, the private residence of the royal family. However, this tranquil life was about to be shattered by personal tragedy and cataclysmic world events.
By 1901, Alexandra’s and Nicholas’s first four children were all girls. The Romanov family needed a male heir and Alexandra desperately wanted to provide her husband a son. She turned to mystics in hopes of conceiving a boy, but to no avail. Alexandra had become so frantic that in 1903 she experienced pseudocyesis, a false pregnancy. Finally, in 1904, she gave birth to a son they named Alexei. Her joy was short-lived however as it was discovered he suffered from hemophilia.
Alexandra and her children were eventually reunited with her husband and all were placed under house arrest in the Bolshevik controlled city of Yekaterinburg, at the Ipatiev House in April 1918. The family endured a nightmare of uncertainty and fear, never knowing if they would remain there, be separated or killed. During the night of July 16-17, 1918, Alexandra and her family were escorted to the basement of Ipatiev House, where they were executed by Bolsheviks, bringing an end to more than three centuries of the Romanov rule.
