Martha and Maria Orthodox Christian Sisterhoods. Princess Alice of Greece and her unknown sisterhood

This text was originally published in the newsletter of the Ecumenical Patriarchate Permanent Delegation to the World Council of Churches, edition of April 2021.

Priest Georgy Kochetkov, the founder of the Transfiguration Brotherhood in Russia, addressing the Deaconesses symposium last year, noted: “Holy Martyr Elisabeth Feodornova prepared the way for the restoration of the order of deaconesses in a broader context, through a number of publications on the topic within the Russian Church. She founded the Martha and Mary Convent in Moscow and thought a great deal about the significance of deaconesses for the Church and for the Russian people as a whole”.

St. Elizabeth’s charm (see photo) was so great that it automatically attracted even the atheist Bolsheviks, who the last months of 1917 and the beginning of 1918, to everyone’s amazement, granted the Martha and Mary Convent and its abbess complete freedom. When they first arrived to examine the Martha and Mary Convent, one of them, apparently a student, even praised the life of the sisterhood, saying that no luxuries were noticeable and good order were the rule, which was in no way blameworthy. Seeing his sincerity, the superior of the sisterhood, Grand Duchess Elizabeth, started a conversation with him about the outstanding qualities of socialist and Christian ideals. “Who knows,” remarked her unknown Bolshevik influenced by her arguments, “perhaps we are headed for the same goal, only by different paths”. “Obviously we are still unworthy of a martyr’s crown,” the abbess replied to the sisters congratulating her for such a successful end to the first encounter with the Bolsheviks. But that crown was not far from her and her sister Barbara. Few months later they were assassinated during the October revolution, with Lenin welcoming their death with the following remarks: “Virtue with the crown on it is a greater enemy to the world revolution than a hundred tyrant tsars”! Eventually, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth was killed in 1918 and her remains are now buried in the Church of Maria Magdalene in the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem.

Prince Philipp, the Duke of Edinburg, who was buried at St. George’s Chapel in the Windsor Castle on Saturday, April 17, had also her mother, Princess Alice, an Orthodox and niece of the later canonized St. Elizabeth, who had established – motivated by her social and pastoral work – a similar sisterhood in Greece with exactly the same name, buried at the crypt of the same chapel in December 1969, at the age of 84. Not long before her death Princess Alice expressed the wish to be buried in Jerusalem, next to her aunt, Grand Duchess – and now a Saint of the Russian Orthodox Church – Elizabeth Feodorovna. Nineteen years after her death her coffin was transferred to the crypt in Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, next to her aunt’s, and at her grave the words “Your will be done”.

The “Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Maria” of nuns was founded in 1939 by Princess Alice of Greece, and is the first of this type in Greece, dominated at that time by the more politically and less socially oriented male brotherhood “Zoe”. Her sisterhood, as the one of her aunts, was inspired by the corresponding Gospel passage of Christ’s meeting with Lazarus’ sisters Martha and Mary: “Martha-Martha, you take care of a lot of things, but one of them is needed” (Lk 10:41).

Princess Alice had consciously become Orthodox, something that was not understood by her aristocratic environment, which forced her into inhuman and degrading treatment earlier that decade. With psychiatrists following Freud’s theory, who attributed everything to libido and of course did not have proper knowledge of the human soul devoted to Christ. They were the psychiatrists who not only could not make a correct diagnosis of a psychiatric issue but also drove a Christian and reasonable person crazy, only because she had visions of Christ and believed she was His bride. A vision very familiar to the Orthodox female monastic tradition.

Feeling a Greek patriot, after her earlier marriage to Prince Andrew, she refused to leave Greece, when it was occupied by the Germans. And began her charity work “looking after the poorest people,” as her mother, Princess Victoria, described it soon after her return to Greece. During the war, she is reported to work in soup kitchens in Athens, and tried to use her royal status to procure medical supplies for the Greek people.

She developed a great deal of philanthropic activity during those difficult occupation days, as she did during WWI, an activity that has given her an award of the “Royal Red Cross” by the British throne. When asked by a German officer, who visited her at home during the German Nazis occupation (believing that she was friendly to the Nazis regime, because three of her daughters had married Nazi supporters): “What can I do for you?” she replied: “You can take your troops from my country!”

Princess Alice was free to move around during the Civil War when the fighting in Athens raged, to offer help on both sides where needed, ignoring the advice of the British troops, who told her she was in danger of being shot dead. In January 1949, princess Alice, wearing a gray habit, “completely withdrew from the world” (her words), and retreated to the island of Tinos, where she was given some land by the Church of the Evangelistria. After the colonels’ coup d’état in Greece in 1967 she left for England and lived together with her son Prince Philip. For the rest of her life, she continued to wear the monastic religious habit, even inside the Buckingham Palace.

Princess Alice’ main biography was that by Hugo Vickers, Alice. Princess Andrew of Greece, Macmillan 2001. He has undoubtedly made an excellent job, but followed – as his assignment was – the model of a royal biography. Even though he consulted Orthodox and Greek sources and Steven Runciman familiar with Orthodoxy, he had not made any profound theological analysis. I am referring to the model of Orthodox Christian witness with emphasis on the social and pastoral responsibility, evident in the famous sisterhoods of the pre-and during the-soviet Russia, sisterhood “Martha and Mary” by St. Elizabeth Feodorovna, the present Transfiguration Brotherhood of St. Philaret Institute and its founder Rev. Georgy Kochetkov, and the newly discovered in Greece, “Martha and Maria,” run from the Nazis occupation during WWII until the 1967 military coup by Princess Alice of Greece.

The only important detail that survived was Princess Alice and her sisterhood’s always having an eye out for the downtrodden. In particular, she was also remembered fondly for sheltering a Jewish family in her Athens residence during the Nazi occupation of Greece. She reportedly cared for the Cohen family (searched for by the Gestapo for deportation to concentration camps in Germany) spending hours at a time with them; once, she even used her deafness as an excuse to wave off the Gestapo. As Philippe Cohen, one of the family's descendants, said, “we all owe our existence to the courage of Princess Alice.”

In 1993 Princess Alice was bestowed the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” (in Israel), and in 2010 the “British Hero of the Holocaust” (in UK). The Cohens even suggested a Jerusalem street be named after Princess Alice. But the late royal was never interested in being celebrated by the press. “I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special,” Prince Philipp said when visiting her grave in 1994 and planted an olive tree. “She was a person with deep religious faith and she would have considered it to be a totally human action to fellow human beings in distress.”

The life and work of this Orthodox “deaconess,” Princess Alice of Greece and her sisterhood, need to be further, scholarly and theologically, examined. The neglect of their remarkable achievements was due both to political and religious reasons. For the former, because of her royal status, especially after the establishment of the Parliamentary Democracy in Greece, and for the latter, because of the completely different orientation the main well-known brotherhood in Greece (ZOE) had inclined toward a more political/cultural orientation after WWII, thus monopolizing the brother/sisterhood Orthodox Christian witness.