How the Romanov sisters read their fortunes every New Year's Eve

On 31 December, the last entry for the year 1916 in Olga's diary said:

"Read [our] fortunes with
Anya using wax and paper.
Lord, save us and have mercy on
us in 1917, the new year."

Although Russian orthodox church frowns on such practices because they're considered pagan, the Romanov girls did it each New Year's eve, according to their diaries.

There were many ways of "predicting fortunes", specifically for young unmarried girls, the candle wax was considered one of the most accurate. You poured melted candle wax into a bowl of water, and the resulting shapes supposedly answered your questions about the future. For example, a girl could ask when she would be married, or what the initials of her future intended may be, and then read the answer in wax.

Reading fortunes on paper was intended mostly to answer questions about love and compatibility. You wrote down your own full name and the name of your love interest on a piece of paper. Then you count the number of the same letter pairs between the names and them up. The resulting number gave the answer for various things. And each number had a specific meaning.

One can only imagine which questions Olga, Tatiana and Maria would ask... Of course it is all very vague and subjective, but sounds like just harmless innocent fun.

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