The journey of a Russian relic.

In the small hours of a July night in 1918, Elizabeth Fyodorovna Romanova was thrown into a mine shaft by members of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police force that would later become known as the KGB. As both a member of the royal family and a nun of the Orthodox Church, Sister Elizabeth was doubly hated by the anti-imperial and anti-religious revolutionaries who had just taken power in Moscow. Beneath her full length alabaster white habit, she wore about her neck a medallion given to her personally by the czar, an icon with the inscription “Not Made By Human Hands.” It was all she owned as she dropped forty feet into the pit.

But this is only the beginning of Romanova's journey-- a trip which her body would take long after life abandoned it. Peter Manseau shares the tale of one Russian nun,other martyrs, and the travels of their bones  in an excerpt from his book, Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead.

For more on relics, saints, communism, and the political lives of dead bodies:

• How the arm of St. Francis Xavier was used to dissuade the Japanese from communism.
• Relics and Remains: A Past and Present Conference hosted by the British Academy in November 2008.
• The religiosity of Soviet Communism, per Synapostasy.
• The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change by Katherine Verdery.