Some of you may remember that a while back I wrote about the movie 'Anastasia'. I thought I would allow myself to write once about the Romanov family and that would be that. But in honor of it having been forty years this year of their bones being found, I thought I would bring the topic of whether the church is going to accept the bones as belonging to the Tsar.
Let me start with the night of July 17th, 1918. Around one in the morning, a Bolshevik guard knocked on the Imperial physician's door to tell him that there are riots in the street that could be unsafe for the family to be on the first floor. He was ordered to wake everyone up and tell them to dress.
As soon everyone was up and dressed, which was around 1:30, the guards took all seven members of the Last Imperial Family and their four servants to the basement. The former Tsar was carrying his son, Alexei, who happened to be ill at the time. His wife, Alexandra, was always in pain and could not be on her feet for long. When the prisoners got downstairs, there were no chairs. Alexandra had asked the guards to get chairs, so they brought two; one for the former Tsarina and one for the former Tsarevich.
The leader of the execution team, Yakov Yurovsky, came in around two in the morning. He told the family that he had come down to execute them. The former Tsar only had time to say "What?" Before being shot a few times. I promise I won't go any more into detail about how they died than I have too. Yurovsky meant to execute them much earlier than he did, but he had to wait for the trucks to put them into after the task to arrive. Of course, the truck was late and did not arrive until after one in the morning.
After the execution, the bodies were thrown into a truck, and taken deep into woods just outside of Ekaterinburg, the city in which they were executed in. The bodies were burned and thrown into an old mine. After fifty eight years, Gueli Riabov, and his team found the bones of the Last Imperial Family. They had been searching for decades and finally came across them. Of course, they couldn't say anything about it to anyone, or take them to test them because in 1976 the Soviet Union was still around.
In 1991, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics finally did fall, Riabov went back with his team and was able to test the bones. The problem was, eleven people were killed that night. The bones they found were only belonged nine of the bodies. The other two were found in 2007. They belonged to the Tsarevich and one of his sisters, either Maria or Anastasia.
In August of 2000, before other two bodies were found, the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the Romanov Family as saints. Genealogists compared the DNA of the bones to those of Alexander III. The church did not accept the results. There are still debates about if Tsar Alexander III had been exhumed. This is one of the reasons the church will not except the bones as the Romanovs. Supporters of Anna Anderson, only one of the many imposters of Anastasia, say that the church is right for not excepting them. Of course this is only because they believe that Anastasia or other members of the family did not die on that night.
Of course, if you believe that Anastasia survived or that the church should not except the bones, I respect that. This is just my view.
