We had never known them. They had brought us here to find that out.

In her novel The Pursuit of Love Nancy Mitford wrote:
'...click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth... I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.'

The following photos are sad for rather more obvious reasons. They are totally macabre but I'm slightly obsessed. The first shows the four Romanov grand duchesses, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, daughters of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who were all murdered in 1918 during the Russian Revolution.

There is something so strange about how the girls are posing for what seems to be a formal photograph, not to mention the wholly un-sweet black background. They look wise beyond their years, no?

The second photo, I'm pretty sure, is of Olga and Tatiana.

It strikes me that this could easily be from a photoshoot in Russh magazine. Again, the girls seem oddly worldly.

After their father abdicated, the family spent months held under house arrest by revolutionaries. During this time they began sewing the multitude of jewels in their possession into the lining of their clothes, in the hope of smuggling them out when the time came.
On the night of the childrens' murders the jewels, still woven into their garments, deflected some of the bullets shot by their executioners.

Perhaps this is in poor taste (I don't mean it to be) but the story makes me think of this Romance Was Born jeweled t-shirt: