Sunday, July 22, 2012

Of Russian Saints

The stitch for this week of TAST was Basque stitch, which is found on many old embroideries in the Basque region of Spain.  This was a pretty easy stitch and although a bit fiddly, I truly liked working it.  It goes fairly quickly and you get a lot of design for your effort.  
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I used a brown pearl cotton in satin stitch for the Orthodox cross and 3 strands of a variegated brown/gold cotton floss for the stem stitched IC XC and the basque stitch surround.  The lettering was done with a smaller pearl cotton in brown.

I chose my subject because I am Orthodox and I have read several books about the Russian royal family, their life and their sad demise.  They were horrendously assassinated by the Bolsheviks on July 17, 1918, even though Nicholas II had already abdicated as they wished.  They just could not trust that the royals would not win favor and take back their thrones.
  
The Romanov family members were canonized as new martyrs in 1981 by the Russian Church Abroad and as passion-bearers in 2000 by the Moscow Patriarchate.  Passion-bearers are those who face death with resignation in a Christ-like manner.
Other royal family members were canonized as martyrs of oppression by the Bolsheviks.

The bodies of the Tsar and Tsarina and 3 of their daughters were interred at St Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg in 1988, and on August 23, 2007 the Tsarevich and his last sister were found and DNA proved who they were.  Finally all the family were accounted for.

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