EMPRESS ALEXANDRA FEODOROVNA AND OTMA: MATCHING BRACELETS

Empress Alexandra Feodorovna with her son Alexei. A gold band bracelet can clearly be seen on her right wrist.

Yakov Yurovsky: “Alexandra Feodorovna loudly expressed her displeasure when I wanted to remove from her wrist a gold bracelet that was tightly fastened there and which was impossible to remove without the help of some tool. She announced that she has been wearing this bracelet on her wrist for 20 years, and now there is an attempt to forcibly remove it. Taking into account that all the daughters were wearing the same bracelets, and that these bracelets did not seem to have any special value, I left it alone.”

From the 4/24 July, 1918 diary entry of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna: “They both forced us to show them all our jewels which we were wearing, and the younger of them wrote everything down in detail, and they took them all from us (where, for how long, why? I do not know), they only left me two bracelets from my uncle Leo, which cannot be removed, and one bracelet for each of the children which we gifted them and which cannot be removed, just as Nicholas’s wedding bands cannot be removed. “

Grand Duchesses OTMA, wearing gold ban bracelets on their right wrists.

The Empress and the grand duchesses wore these fine gold bracelets on their right wrists. This charming detail, not immediately obvious – especially when there are a number of bracelets worn on a wrist, the way Alexandra loved to wear, is significant because it is like a connecting thread between the mother and her daughters.