Here is what Hugo Mayer writes in his biography, Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia about the condition of Ella’s body after it was recovered:
Father Seraphim also told Lady Athlone that the body of the grand duchess,“strange to say was not decomposed at all.” Lady Milford Haven seemingly confirms this, in a passage already quoted in the Epilogue, that later on when he opened her coffin at the convent in Irkutsk, “our Ella’s body was not decayed only dried up.” (Hessian Grand Duchal Archives). Prince Nicholas Kudashev, the last envoy of imperial Russia to China, also happened to see her body at Harbin, where Father Seraphim stopped en route to Beijing. “The Grand Duchess,” he wrote, “lay as if alive, completely unchanged since the day that I met her in Moscow on the way to Beijing, except that on one side of her face was a large bruise from a blow sustained in the fall into the mineshaft.” (Materialy k zhitiyu…, p. 152). General Smolin tells us that her fingers “were stiffened in the sign of the cross.”
