Tatiana and Olga Nikolaevna, 1898

Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia Romanov [ 1906 ]

— ❀ ᴛʜᴇ ʀᴏᴍᴀɴᴏᴠ sɪsᴛᴇʀs ᴇᴅɪᴛ;; ᴏʟɢᴀ, ᴛᴀᴛɪᴀɴᴀ, ᴍᴀʀɪᴀ ᴀɴᴅ ᴀɴᴀsᴛᴀᴄɪᴀ ೃ .⋆

“Beautiful, and willful, and dead before her time”

"Father asks to … remember that the evil which is now in the world will become yet more powerful, and that it is not evil which conquers evil, but only love …"

Happy Birthday Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia!

FAVORITE OTMA PHOTOS: ANASTASIA It was the first time I had seen any of the four. The two older ones were in simple white, each with a single string of small pearls, and with their heavy dark hair hanging over their shoulders looked very girlish and sweet. Olga carried a little bunch of violets, and Marie and the ten-year-old Anastasia had boxes of silver-wrapped chocolates. Anastasia sat down nearest me and gave me a demure little smile as she set the chocolates on the railing between us. She was not a beautiful child, but there was something frank and winning about her. Music behind the curtain was playing in a very low key, and she began to hum the air softly to herself. It was a haunting air, with a minor strain suggestive of the Volga Boat Song. "What is that song you are humming?" I asked. "Oh," she said, "it is an old song about a little girl who had lost her doll." The music faded out then, the people were crowding in from the foyer, and she was biting into another chocolate. Her white gloves were now quite hopeless, but when I went to sleep that night her song was humming away tantalizingly in my head. "The little girl who had lost her doll." That was more than forty years ago. - Post Wheeler, Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1955)

FAVORITE OTMA PHOTOS: TATIANA She's a Grand Duchess from head to toe, so aristocratic and regal. Her face is pale matte, and only the cheeks are slightly rosy, as if pink satin is trying to escape from her skin. Her profile is flawlessly beautiful, as if cut from marble by a great artist. She laughs more rarely than her sisters. On the pale outlines of her face are traces of deep thoughts and sometimes even sadness. Without any words I feel that she is special, different from her sisters. I feel hers—is a wholly secluded and unique world. - Sofia Ofrosimova

FAVORITE OTMA PHOTOS: MARIA She was born good, I often think, with the very smallest trace of original sin possible. She is a very fine and pretty child, with great, dark-blue eyes and the fine level dark brows of the Romanoff family. She has the face of one of Botticelli’s angels. But good and sweet- tempered as she is, she is also very human. She is constantly held up as an example to her elder sisters. They declared she was a step-sister. Vainly I pointed out that in all fairy tales it was the elder sisters who were step-sisters and the third was the real sister. They would not listen, and shut her out from all their plays. One day they made a house with chairs at one end of the nursery and shut out poor Marie, telling her she might be the footman. She suddenly dashed across the room, rushed into the house, dealt each sister a slap in the face, and ran into the next room, coming back dressed in a doll’s cloak and hat, and with her hands full of small toys. "I won’t be a footman, I'll be the kind, good aunt, who brings presents.” They had learned their lesson—from that hour they respected her rights in the family. - Margaret Eager, Six Years at the Russian Court (1906)

FAVORITE OTMA PHOTOS: OLGA Dressed in a simple pale-pink chiffon frock, her fair hair bound in a silver ribbon and shining like burnished gold, she danced every dance, enjoying herself as simply and wholeheartedly as any girl at her first ball. I have a vivid memory of her standing on the steps leading down from the gallery to the floor of the ball-room, trying gaily to settle a dispute between three young Grand Dukes who all protested that they had been promised the next dance. Watching her I wondered what the future was going to hold for her, and which of the many possible suitors who had been mentioned from time to time she would eventually marry, but certainly on that night of music and laughter no thought of the coming terror and grim and frightful tragedy ever came into my mind. - Meriel Buchanan, The Dissolution Of An Empire (1932)

THE ROMANOV GIRLS Goodbye. Don't forget me.

Their pink-papered bedrooms were furnished with thick carpets and ivory-painted furniture. As the sisters grew up, icons, paintings and photographs went up along the walls, and frilly dressing tables were installed. Fashion magazines that Tatiana ordered from all over Russia and from abroad covered night tables. The princesses took warm baths at night with perfumed bath water from Coty, and they scattered jewelry cases, manicure sets, and combs and brushes on their vanities. The blankets on their beds were adorned with their initials, and their wardrobes were filled with matching pink velvet kokoshniki encrusted with bows. It was all so much typical, girlish ephemera, but to the public, the four Romanov sisters remained as beautiful and inaccessible as storybook princesses.