#3 - RW 265
Russian Orthodox church commemorates anniversary of tsar's death
July 17, 2003
AFP

The Russian Orthodox church held services across the country to commemorate the assassination of Tsar Nicholas II and his family by Bolshevik revolutionaries exactly 85 years ago.

The focus of the commemoration was on the Urals city Yekaterinburg where on Wednesday a golden-domed church was consecrated on the site of the former Ipatiev house in whose cellars the royal couple including their five children and four servants were executed by a Bolshevik firing squad.

Nicholas II, whose death on July 17, 1918 followed his abdication in March 1917 and the Bolshevik seizure of power seven months later, was canonised by the Russian Orthodox church in 2000.

Russian Orthodox patriarch Alexy II was due to hold a service at the Trinity Sergius monastery outside Moscow late Thursday.

The ailing patriarch had been advised not to travel to Yekaterinburg for the consecration of the new church or Thursday's liturgy following a procession to the forest clearing where the royal family's remains were discovered in the early 1980s.

The remains found at Yekaterinburg were disinterred in 1991. Those of the tsar, his wife and three daughters -- Tatiana, Olga and Anastasia -- were reburied at the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg in 1998.

But the Russian Orthodox hierarchy has been reluctant to accept the validity of tests showing that the remains were indeed those of the tsar and his family. During the tsar's rule, the Orthodox church considered he had the divine right to rule.

In a message to the several hundred pilgrims who travelled to Yekaterinburg Wednesday, Alexy II said the building of the new church marked "a possible turning point" in Russia's history.

Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the Grand Duchess of the Romanov dynasty, Maria Vladimirovna, were among the 3,000 people who attended the inauguration.

Ceremonies took place Thursday in Saint Petersburg, Tsarskoye Selo and several other cities.

At Pskov, in northwestern Russia, church officials inaugurated the recently restored church in which Nicholas II announced his abdication.

The father superior at the Peter and Paul Cathedral, Hegumen Alexander, said that because of ambivalent attitudes regarding the remains buried there, the commemorative service would be held "in the center of the temple and not in the Catherine Chapel where the grave is," the ITAR-TASS news agency reported.

Although DNA tests have shown with with virtual certainty that the remains found in the forest were those of members of the royal family, the Orthodox church insists the results are inconclusive.