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Saint Princess Trakanova
Born 18th Century the illegitimate child of Empress Elizabeth and Count Razumovskiy, she was sent abroad at a young age to be educated, which enabled a Polish adventuress to impersonated the Princess and thereby inherit the throne of Russia. The adventuress was quickly incarcerated, perishing in jail, but the threat the adventuress posed made the new monarch, Catherine the Great concerned.
She decided to lure Trakanova home and confine her to a nunnery for the rest of her life. Count Orlov, Catherine’s lover, was entrusted with this task and set sail and found the Princess.
He seduced her upon a ship and they spent their time together travelling as lovers. However, as the ship approached St. Petersberg Orlov locked her within their nuptial cabin and as she screamed he left her.
Princess Traknova was taken and placed under strict isolation in the Ivanovskiy Convent where she remained for 25 years until Catherine’s death. As the story is told, Sister Inokinya Dosieeya (as she was then called) accepted her fate with God and chose to remain a nun in the convent. This is only true in part.
Though now religious, her twenty-five years spent cut off from the world, from the education, parties and social life, was spent with only one source of knowledge - holy Scriptures. She found God, her only salvation in her confinement, and when the news of Catherine’s death reached her she was overjoyed. She longed to escape the confinement of the nuns, her only companions who would beat her for being too beautiful and for her past wanton life.
The nuns came to her that day to tell her that she was to be freed, but they would take her to the chapel where Catherine’s remains were laid so she could make her prayers as her last task. She agreed, happy to see the daylight, eager to be free of her jailers. It wasn’t Catherine’s tomb and she suspected as much when they let her out of the carriage at the Novaspasskiy Monastery, there the nuns dragged her screaming inside, stripped her, and sealed her within her prepared tomb. The last of her confinement was spent buried alive. She died within the hour.
As she died she only then resigned to her fate, but even that was stolen from her. She awoke to the halls of the Labyrinth, her fury against her Jailers driving her very existence. Her hatred was not against God, no, but against those whose falsely serving God who confined her to a religious prison. And it was not just her, but others.
Princess Trakanova has become familiar with the Novaspasskiy Monastery - she uses it as a place of sanctuary and hunts down those Lictors and servants wrongly following God. She often laments over her body, but that sorrow soon grows into rage vented on those who jail the soul. She never had the chance for the continuation of her life because of those nuns, and the pain burns, the pain of not knowing free choice after God, but being made only to know God.
Princess Trakanova will never know release: her anger at the imprisonment of spirituality grows with Binah’s quest for the establishment of religion; her servants going to extra lengths to speed the process, and the children are the targets of this war, just as Princess Trakanova was but a child when Orlov seduced her. This frustration grows to an intensity and somewhere along the line she loses control and sinks to Inferno to a purgatory of her own making, where she becomes the oppressor and violently attacks the children in a bizarre reversal of her vindication, but it is not a mass purgatory of children, but hers, because her old vindication still lives within her and every punishment of a child is a punishment of herself for her failure in preventing Binah’s servants escalating total commitment.
Vindication: A person must free those imprisoned spiritually from experiencing the world on their own choosing, not just the rigid dogma of religion preventing experience for no other reason than control and slavery.
Abilities: To reveal Lictors within the church, and to expel Binah’s servants. In the future this power grows and Princess Trakanova drags the jailers down into her purgatory where they are subject to her enforcement and orders.
Communication: In parables. In the future this will change and communication will only be through her screams in maddening rages.
Artefacts: Her bible, illuminated with optimistic notes directed toward God scrawled in the sides. Her wedding ring from Orlov, a gold band of leaves with a flower of diamonds and ruby set in the centre. Her crucifix, a wooden cross, with Jesus carved from the same wood. Rosary beads, very worn black beads.
Stigmatisation: 24