Experts May Have Found Remains of Czar’s Children
August 25 2007
Alexei Vladykin/Associated Pres
A cross in Yekaterinburg marks where two bodies — maybe those of Aleksei and a sister — were found.
An archaeologist in Yekaterinburg, the city where the royal Romanov family was imprisoned and then murdered, said clues left by a leader of the family’s assassins had led investigators to a makeshift grave where they found the possible remains of the czar’s son, Aleksei, and one of his daughters.
Under Lenin’s orders, the czar and his family were shot to death in 1918 in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg, a city in the Ural Mountains in the heart of the country. Their bodies were then most likely doused with acid, mutilated and buried in secret graves so the remains could not be recovered and used as a rallying point for anti-Bolshevik forces.
Nicholas had abdicated the year before, and he and his family were then detained.
In 1991, during the last days of the Soviet Union, the remains of Nicholas, his wife, Aleksandra, and three of their five children were discovered in the city, and seven years later, they were interred in a cathedral in St. Petersburg that holds the crypts of other Russian royalty.
But the remains of Aleksei, the 13-year-old heir to the throne, and one daughter — probably 19-year-old Maria, though there is some dispute about which one — could not be located.
In 2002, scientists thought they might have found those remains, but testing proved them wrong.
On Thursday, though, Sergei Pogorelov, an archaeologist in Yekaterinburg, said in an interview with a Russian television station that the newly unearthed remains might be the missing ones. He said an anthropologist had already determined that the bones were those of a boy 10 to 13 years old and a woman 18 to 23 years old. “Additional analysis and comparisons will be carried out,” he said.
Whatever the results of that testing, which is expected to include DNA matching, they will probably not settle the matter. The leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church has never fully acknowledged that the remains of the czar were discovered in 1991, even though scientists conducted extensive DNA tests, using samples from relatives of the royal family, that appeared to prove their authenticity.
Already on Friday, the church leadership in Moscow expressed skepticism about this new find.
In fact, hoaxes, blunders and all manner of misinformation have long abounded when it comes to the Romanovs and their fate. For decades after the assassinations, people would surface and claim that they were family members who had somehow survived the bloodshed, most notably the czar’s daughter Anastasia.
Friday, November 28, 2008
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