Maria Fyodorovna To Be Reburied Alongside Romanovs

By Irina Titova

Staff Writer

Published: May 22, 2001 (Issue # 671)

Three years after the belated burial of the remains of the Romanovs, Russia's last royal family, President Vla dimir Putin has approved the burial of yet another Romanov - Nicholas II's mother Maria Fyodorovna - whose remains are currently buried in Denmark.

During a meeting last week with Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, Putin gave the nod to the re-burial of the last Tsar's mother in the Romanov crypt at the Peter and Paul Fortress, according to press reports. No date for the funeral has yet been set, though it will most likely take place before the end of next year.

The burial of Maria Fyodorovna - unlike that of Nicholas II, his wife and three of their children - will be a quiet affair, because there is no doubt as to the identity of her remains. She also stipulated that she be buried in Peter and Paul Fortress with her husband and son.

In Nicholas II's case, scientists took decades to establish with DNA testing that the bones pulled out of a mine shaft near Yekaterinburg in 1973 were indeed his and those of his wife and three of their five children. With that established, bitter political and religious divisions erupted, and Alexy II, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, refused to attend the 1998 burial of the Romanovs because of doubts he had over the validity of the DNA tests. The then president Boris Yeltsin also balked at attending, but grudgingly appeared for the funeral.

As for Maria Fyodorovna, she was buried in Copenhagen's Roskilde Cathedral in 1928. She was born in 1847 as Maria Sofia Frederick Dagmara, daughter of the Danish king, Christian IX.

In 1866, she married Tsarevich Alexander of Russia (the future Tsar Alexander III), converted to the Orthodox faith and changed her name to Maria Fyodorovna Romanova. Together they had six children, among them Nicholas.

After her son abdicated the throne in 1917, she escaped from St. Petersburg with her daughter to the Crimea, and in 1919 from there they escaped Russia for England and later Copenhagen. Even in the last hours of her life, she refused to believe that the Bolsheviks had murdered her son and his family.

The decision to rebury her remains was initiated by Duke Nikolai Romanov, great grandson of Tsar Nicholas I, who now heads the Romanov Dynasty Association in Switzerland. He wrote to both Putin and Yakovlev and met Denmark's Queen Margrethe II.

"We should keep in mind that the up-coming event is not an act of glorifying the Romanov or the monarchy, but a matter of respect to all Russian history," said Ivan Artsishevsky, head of the State Protocol Department in St. Petersburg, which is handling the arrangements.

"Everybody has the right to have any opinion of the Romanovs, and some go so far as to consider them responsible for bloodshed in the country - but we can't ignore the fact that the dynasty ruled the great empire for more than 300 years."

He said for now it is difficult to say how much the ceremony will cost, but in his opinion the budgeting is most likely to come from the St. Petersburg city budget, the Danish royal court, and the Romanov family.