Tanzanite's Castle Full of Books

After a hiatus of a couple of months, Monday Mosaic is back.  I recently finished up The Jewel of St. Petersburg, set during the Russian revolution.  Although the tsar and his wife are more background characters, I decided to a mosaic of Alexandra Feodorovna.

Originally known as Alix of Hesse, her name was changed when she went to Russia and converted to the Russian Orthodox faith.  Alexandra was a granddaughter of England's Queen Victoria and was born in 1872.  She married Tsar Nicholas II of Russia in 1894.  Widely disliked by the Russian people, she was blamed for many of the country's ills which was only made worse by her inability to have a son.  Finally, after 10 years of marriage, she gave birth to the couple's only son, Alexei. The people's dislike of her increased after it became known that Alexei's hemophelia had been inherited from his mother and with the start of WWI (due to her German ancestry). 

In 1917, the tsar and his family were taken prisoner during the revolution, and in July 1918, the family was executed in the basement of the home where they had been imprisoned.  This portrait was done in 1907 by Nikolai Bodarevski.