It is a beautiful belief,
That ever round our head
Are hovering on angel wings,
The spirits of the dead.

        May 18, 1868, St. Petersburg, Russia.  It was Day of St. Job the sufferer.  In the upstairs rooms of one of the enormous palaces, Heir Tsarevich Alexander Alexandrovich, son of Tsar Alexander II, waited impatiently.  Suddenly, there was a little squall, and everyone rushed to see what had happened.  There, very alive and kicking, was the very first child of Tsarevich Alexander and Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna.  His Imperial Highness Grand Duke Nicholas Alexandrovich.  The future Tsar of Russia.

        Only four years later, in the small New Palace at Hesse-Darmstadt in Germany, on June 6, 1872, another newborn baby began to cry.  The mother, Grand Duchess Alice of Hesse, lifted the child gently in her arms as her husband looked on.  This was a daughter - a princess, christened Alix Victoria Louise Helena Beatrice, of Hesse and the Rhine.

        One was a descendant of Catherine the Great, a Romanov by birth, and heir to one sixth of the globe.  The other was a minor German princess, granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England.  One called "Nicky," the other, "Sunny."  One was raised in the pomp and splendor and lax morals of the Russian court; the other, in the safe, conservative confines of Victorian Windsor.  Nicky was mischievous but gentle and humble, with twinkling blue eyes and soldier's bearing.  Alix was playful, too, but it was masked by a fascination with death and religion, and sorrowful, big grey-blue eyes.  No one would have ever thought that these two would one day become the ill-fated last tsar and tsaritsa of Russia.  It was unimagined that they would pass through trial and triumphs together, and die still bound with faithful love to one another.

        This is their story.   Allow yourself to be taken into the lost world of the last Russian tsar and his family.  Pass through the gates of Tsarskoe Selo.  Discover their lost Atlantis, and discover a family joined in love...and death.

* The 20th century Imperial Russian calendar was 13 days behind that of the rest of the world,
having still followed Julian instead of Gregorian reckoning.  During the 19th
century, the Julian calendar was 12 days behind Gregorian time.
After the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin updated
the calendar, also adding two hours to the clocks.  Dates here are denoted
by an O.S. signifying Old Style (the old Russian calendar) or N.S. (New Style.) *

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