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The riddle of the Romanovs is cracked at last

Moscow: It was one of the great mysteries of the 20th century. In the early hours of July 11, 1918, a Bolshevik firing squad killed Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, together with his wife, four young daughters and son.

The remains of the Romanov family were dug up in 1991, formally identified using DNA samples, and reburied in a St. Petersburg cathedral.

But two of the Romanovs were never found. The bodies of the tsar’s heir, Prince Alexei, and his sister Princess Maria were missing. Archival evidence suggested that the pair had been buried away from the others. But repeated digs at the leafy spot on the outskirts of Yekaterinburg in southern Russia, where the remains of the rest of the family were found, failed to reveal a resting place.

But last month Sergei Plotnikov, a 46-year-old builder, stumbled on a small hollow covered with nettles. Part of a team from an amateur history group who spent free summer weekends looking for the lost Romanovs, Mr. Plotnikov said he was searching in the clearing surrounded by silver birch trees when his prodder hit something hard.

Mr. Plotnikov said the evidence he discovered showed that the two missing Romanovs had suffered the same fate as their siblings and murdered parents.

“It was clear they didn’t die peacefully. Their remains were very damaged. You could see that they had been covered in acid and burned with flames. What we dug up was in a very bad state. We didn’t find any bullet holes. ”

Russian archaeologists confirmed they had discovered the remains of a 10-13 year old boy and an 18-23 year old woman — presumed to be Prince Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria.

The wooded site, is not far from the original spot where the other Romanovs were secretly discovered in 1976. There was little doubt that the remains were those of the Romanov children, Sergei Pogorelov, deputy director of the Sverdlovsk region’s archaeological institute, said. As well as bone fragments, his team found pieces of Japanese ceramic bottles — used to carry sulphuric acid poured on the Romanovs’ corpses.

They also recovered seven teeth, three bullets of various calibres, a tantalising fragment of a dress, and wire from a wooden box.

“Archaeologists surmise that they are the remains of Prince Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria,” Mr. Pogorelov told a press conference.

Forensic scientists in Yekaterinburg said they were studying 44 different bone fragments, ranging in size from a few millimetres to several centimetres. DNA tests were likely to confirm their origins, officials said.

There are lingering questions, however, as to why this latest dig apparently succeeded when others had failed.

“Archaeologists excavated practically the whole site in the 1990s but then ran out of money,” Maria Sosnina, a journalist with the local Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, said. “They had to stop. They packed up, leav ing behind an 8-metre- square area of ground. And that is exactly the place where they [the new team] found them. ”

Russia’s Orthodox Church, which refused to accept that the previous remains were those of the Romanovs, cast doubt on the latest find.

“I would like to hope that the examination will be more thorough and detailed than the examination of the so-called Yekaterinburg remains,” Bishop Mark of Yegorvevsk, deputy head of the Moscow patriarch’s external relations branch, said.

Mr. Plotnikov believes Russia’s turbulent history has achieved a rare moment of closure. “This is a big thing,” he said. “It’s a really important discovery.”— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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