 In the village of Nizhrilovskaya there dwelt fewer than two hundred souls. And as they slept in their beds through the long winter nights, spidery wisps of wood smoke rose into the brittle air from the chimneys of their huts. These izbás, each of rough-hewn logs, were clustered on the flank of a hill where a few of the farmers tended meager flocks of goats and sheep while others coaxed threadbare plots of wheat and rye from the rocky soil. Six days by wagon from Saint Petersburg, it was a world unto itself, as far removed from the glories of the imperial court as from the nocturnal firmament. So as they slumbered, the humble folk of Nizhrilovskaya, if they possessed the capacity at all, could conjure only in their dreams the resplendence of the tsar, his beautiful wife and their five children. And when word finally reached them many weeks after the fact that all the royals were dead at the hands of the Bolsheviks, they were stupified.
“It is the will of God,” declared the village priest with great sagacity from the altar of St. Sophia’s, the tiny church that occupied the center of Nizhrilovskaya. His flock, the old and the young, echoed this somber pronouncement, bowing their heads reverently and crossing themselves once, twice, thrice while the priest swung a brass censer to and fro, leaving the air redolent with the sweet spice of frankincense. At the age of twenty-seven, Father Pyotr Petrovich Bulgakov was a man angular of body and intensity of mien, an imposing figure in his black cassock and clerical cap, gold cross and chain. The pallor of his drawn face was rendered the more stark by a bushy beard and sunken dark eyes that not a few of the villagers swore in hushed tones could pierce to their very souls.
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