In 1939 the family left Bavaria once more. Irina, now twenty, and seventeen-year-old Elena had just finished their schooling at a convent boarding-school. Elena enrolled in a Russian institute in Yugoslavia, founded by the widow of General Dukhonin and staffed by émigré professors, but the coming war soon drove her home. The parents decided to emigrate to Canada, where Dmitry owned property.
History repeated itself; they fled again—through Sweden, where they waited a month for a ship, then by sea to New York and finally Quebec. As ever, they came together only on feast days; the rest of the time everyone worked.
By chance both sisters entered military service as code-breakers. At a luncheon they met a naval officer who needed help translating intercepted German correspondence. Fluent in the language, Irina and Elena spent the war deciphering letters for the Allied cause.
After the war, Irina married and moved to New York; Elena soon followed. Every Sunday they attended an Orthodox parish and sang in the choir—yet the rest of the week they basked in the whirlwind of city life. Elena sometimes felt like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower. Her life was easy and fun, but more and more often she would catch herself thinking that her life was missing something really important. The first link in this chain of events was a visit to the Novo-Diveyevo Monastery located not far from New York. She and her friends ended up in that area by accident. She was not at all dressed to visit a monastery as pilgrim, but she succumbed to her companions’ urging and stepped inside.
The Holy Dormition Stavropegial Novo-Diveyevo Monastery
Elena’s family cherished a deep veneration for St. Seraphim of Sarov, and she longed to pray before the saint’s wonder-working icon kept at Novo-Diveyevo. Her mother had often told her the story of how St. Seraphim once saved Elena’s uncle Victor during the Civil War. Wounded in battle, Victor was guided from the field by an elderly peasant who cared for him, hid him in a village home, and dressed his wounds. After regaining his strength, Victor made his way to Crimea, where he was reunited with his sister Ekaterina. One day they entered a church together; when Victor saw an icon of St. Seraphim, he recognized at once the face of the peasant who had rescued him. From that day forward both siblings carried a small image of the saint wherever they went.
Moved by gratitude, Elena hastened into the monastery church—but the icon was veiled. When she asked whether she might venerate it, she was gently told that, for reasons beyond their control, it could not be shown that day.
Many years later she recalled the moment with tears. “You see, the saint would not receive me—he turned his back on me.” The experience shook her to the core. For the first time she sensed, vividly and painfully, that she was squandering a life meant for something higher. From that day her thoughts turned toward monasticism, though she took no concrete steps—until her beloved brother fell gravely ill.
Georgy was only thirty when the doctors discovered a brain tumor. The disease advanced swiftly, confining him to the hospital. Elena resigned her job to care for him. His agony became hers, and to distract them both he asked her to read aloud from the Lives of the Saints. She found several volumes and read hour after hour at his bedside; the words brought them a measure of peace. Within months Georgy reposed in the Lord.
Elena grieved deeply, not least because her brother left no heirs. She reproached herself—and her mother—for having been too exacting with the young women he had wished to marry, denying him the joy of family life.
After Georgy’s death, Elena never doubted that she wanted to become a nun. Now came the time to choose a monastery. She dreamed of going to the Gorny Monastery in the Holy Land, but she never succeeded at completing the paperwork. What was left for her to do? Nothing but to pray and ask God to arrange it all. And that’s what she did.
The Monastery of the Protection of the Most Holy Mother of God, Bussy-en-Othe
After her brother’s death, Elena spent long hours in the cemetery—either praying beside his grave or sitting near the church. One afternoon Archbishop John of San Francisco happened to sit down beside her. They kept silence for a while, and then Vladyka gently asked whose grave she was visiting. Elena, knowing the miracles wrought through his prayers, told him about Georgy’s illness, her grief, and her longing to enter a monastery—together with the obstacles that seemed to stand in her way.
She expected admonition, consolation, perhaps practical advice. Vladyka merely sighed:
“Memory eternal to the servant of God, Georgy. Do not grieve; everything will unfold as it should.”
A few days later, while Elena was painting the cross on her brother’s grave, a familiar nun hurried toward her.
“We have an abbess visiting from France—she wishes to see you at once.”
That abbess was Mother Eudoxia of the Monastery of the Protection (Pokrov) in Bussy-en-Othe. Their conversation was long and heartfelt. The abbess asked, and Elena answered without reserve. In the end Mother Eudoxia issued a simple invitation: “Come and visit us”—without promises, without pressure.
Elena went, and she never returned. To her the sequence felt unmistakable: God’s will and her brother’s quiet care.
On 4 December 1964, the Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos, Elena Georgievna, Duchess of Leuchtenberg, was received as a novice of the Monastery of the Protection of the Most Holy Mother of God.
“I Had Come Home”
Years later she told her cell-attendant that at the very moment she stepped inside the enclosure she knew: This is my home—one I had never found before. The old sadness melted into a profound, steady joy. She embraced the rule of the monastery to its smallest detail, recalling a maxim often repeated by her parents and governess: Great order begins with small acts; faithfulness shows first in particulars.
Even before she arrived, her first obedience had been settled. Together with Sister Mary, an Englishwoman fluent in Russian, Elena began translating and printing spiritual books. Thus the monastery’s now-famous press was born. Their inaugural publication was an Akathist to St. Seraphim of Sarov—a saint especially dear to Elena’s family.
In 1979 she was tonsured to the Lesser Schema; in preparation she herself copied out The Order of the Monastic Tonsure so as to grasp every word. She received the name Mother Elizaveta, in honor of Righteous Elizabeth, mother of St. John the Forerunner.
A Duchess in a Nun’s Habit
Everyone loved Mother Elizaveta. Her temperament was remarkably even; she never traded on her birth, and grew uneasy if visitors showed more curiosity about her title than her person. Yet pilgrims came from all over the world to meet “the nun descended from Napoleon.” She welcomed each with unfailing courtesy, taking special delight in those from Russia—though she was amused, too, by the many who tried to claim kinship with the Leuchtenbergs.
To her, the lesson was obvious: a title is not privilege but obligation—a debt to one’s homeland, a summons to serve “unto the last breath, the last drop of blood.” She never imposed that view, nor imagined herself better than anyone else.
Her Final Years
Mother Elizaveta fell seriously ill in 2013. As long as she could walk, she visited daily the chapel of St. Seraphim of Sarov, built by the sisters themselves. There she knelt before the icon of the saint standing on his rock, raising her own arms in prayer for the monastery that had become her true home. She begged that services in Church Slavonic never cease, and that Russian sisters might one day return to carry on the traditions of their founding mothers.
Mother Elizaveta reposed in the Lord in November 2013.
No Russian nuns now reside at Bussy-en-Othe, yet Mother Emiliani, the present abbess, guards the legacy with care. Knowledge of Russian is no longer demanded at entrance, but the sisters must learn Church Slavonic, and the liturgy continues in that sacred tongue—just as Mother Elizaveta prayed it would.
