Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete
Великий Канон Андрея Критского
Откуду начну плакати окаяннаго моего жития деяний; кое ли положу начало, Христе, нынешнему рыданию.
Our renderingWhence shall I begin to weep over the deeds of my wretched life; what beginning shall I make, O Christ, to my present lamentation?
What it is
The Great Canon is an extended penitential poem of approximately 250 troparia in which the soul is summoned to repentance through sustained meditation on figures and events from both Testaments, from Adam and Eve through the apostles, as mirrors of the Christian conscience. A personal copy inscribed 'To Tatiana. Tsarskoe Selo. February 10, 1909. from C. Tyutcheva'—Sofia Tyutcheva, a lady of the imperial household—was recovered at Ekaterinburg in 1918, establishing the text's direct use in the spiritual formation of the Romanov children. The Canon is chanted during the first week of Great Lent at the Great Compline services and again in full on the Thursday of the Fifth Week, making it one of the most sustained liturgical experiences of the Orthodox Lenten year. Its theological depth and emotional directness have preserved its use across the entire Orthodox world without interruption since the eighth century.
Why it still matters
Following the Church's prescription and attending or reading the Great Canon at the opening of Lent is one of the most powerful annual acts of self-examination available to an Orthodox Christian; even reading it privately at home during the first week of Lent captures the full weight of its repentance theology.
Kept alongside
Orthodox Psalter (Chasoslovnyi Psaltyr)
Псалтирь
The complete Psalter, divided into twenty kathismata, was read through weekly at Orthodox services and served as the foundational personal devotional text across the entire Romanov era and the whole of Byzantine-Slavic Christianity. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich kept the Psalter among his personal desk-books alongside the Horologion, as documented by the Presidential Library of Russia. Empress Alexandra's Bible in Church Slavonic, recovered at Ekaterinburg with underlined passages and dried herbs pressed between pages, testifies to the Psalter's intimate daily use during captivity. The Psalter was also the primary text from which the Romanov children learned to read Church Slavonic.
Akathist Hymn to the Theotokos
Акафист Пресвятой Богородице
The original and most venerated akathist of Orthodoxy, a 24-stanza Greek alphabetic hymn of praise to the Theotokos whose long stanzas each close with chains of 'Rejoice' salutations and the refrain 'Rejoice, O Bride Unwedded.' It is sung liturgically each year on the Saturday of the Fifth Week of Great Lent and in private devotion throughout the year across the entire Byzantine and Slavic traditions. The Romanov dynasty stood under the patronage of the Feodorovskaya Icon of the Mother of God, and the Feodorovsky Sovereign Cathedral at Tsarskoe Selo had its upper church dedicated to this icon, making the Akathist a constitutive element of every court chapel service and of Empress Alexandra's private prayer rooms. No separately bound Romanov copy of the Akathist is documented in the Ekaterinburg inventory, as the hymn was used liturgically and embedded within the Molitvoslov.
The Jesus Prayer
Молитва Иисусова
The short invocation 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner' has been the central personal prayer of Orthodox hesychasm for fifteen centuries, transmitted through the Desert Fathers, the Sinai tradition, and the Athonite hesychasts to Russian monasticism and lay piety. It appears within the Molitvoslov prayer rule documented as belonging to the Romanov family, and Empress Alexandra explicitly commended the prayer to her children by name in her letters and spiritual counsel. Elder Nikolai Guryanov later testified that Tsar Nicholas II recited it daily, though this oral tradition postdates the Tsar by decades and cannot be treated as primary documentation. The prayer's centrality to the Romanov spiritual world is well established; the personal frequency of its use by individual family members is plausible but cannot be confirmed from contemporary primary sources.