سيرة
Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt was born on June 8, 1872, in Darmstadt, Germany. Her parents were the Grand Duke and Duchess of Darmstadt; her mother was also a daughter of Queen Victoria. When Alix was very young, her sister Mary and then her mother died of diphtheria. Additionally, her brother Frederick (1870–1873) died after falling from a window in their mother's room, a situation complicated by hemophilia. She spent much of her childhood in England, living with her grandmother and various aunts, uncles, and cousins. As she grew older, she took on the role of Landsmutter (Mother of the Land) for her father.
At her sister Elizabeth’s (Ella) wedding to their cousin Sergei of Russia, Alix met Tsarevich Nicholas for the first time and fell in love with him. Despite her feelings, she initially hesitated to marry him because she did not want to abandon her Protestant faith for Russian Orthodoxy. Four or five years after their meeting, Alix's brother Ernest married their first cousin, nicknamed Ducky. Since both were cousins of Nicholas, he attended the wedding to see Alix. During his visit, Nicholas persistently asked her to marry him, and, encouraged by their love and support from their cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, Alix finally agreed.
During the early part of her engagement, Alix stayed with her grandmother Queen Victoria in England, sharing all the events leading to the engagement. However, the rest of the engagement was more difficult. Several months after the engagement, Nicholas’s father fell ill at one of his Russian palaces. Alix hurried to be by their side, and shortly after her arrival, Nicholas became Tsar Nicholas II. After this tragedy, Alix was eager to join the family officially. Soon after the death of her future father-in-law, she converted to the Russian Orthodox faith, taking the name Alexandra Fyodorovna. Though she and Nicholas wished to marry immediately, family insisted the wedding take place after his father’s funeral in Moscow. Thus, the Russian people first saw their future Empress during a time of mourning.
They married on November 26, 1894, shortly after the death of Nicholas’s father. By 1901, they had four daughters: Olga (1895–1918), Tatiana (1897–1918), Maria (1899–1918), and Anastasia (1901–1918). In 1904, Alix gave birth to a son, Alexis (known as Alexei), who tragically suffered from hemophilia, a condition inherited from her family line through her mother, Princess Alice, and grandmother, Queen Victoria.
In 1917, Nicholas was forced to abdicate the Russian throne. While many would have accepted his abdication if it had been in favor of his son, they were confused by his decision to abdicate in favor of his brother. Nicholas made this choice because he knew his son’s chances of survival were slim.
Following the abdication, Nicholas and his family were imprisoned in Siberia and later moved to Ekaterinburg. On the night of July 17, 1918, the Russian royal family was executed. In the 1990s, investigations of the burial sites revealed that the bodies of Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters (which one remains unclear) were missing. DNA testing, using samples from HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (Alix’s great-nephew), confirmed that four of the bodies belonged to the Tsarina and three of her daughters.
