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Russian religious and political leaders gather to rebury cousin of last tsar

REMAINS OF GRAND DUKE NICHOLAS NIKOLAEVICH AND WIFE DEPOSITED IN CHAPEL OF HEROES OF WORLD WAR ONE MEMORIAL COMPLEX

Interfax-Religiia, 30 April 2015

 

To the strains of funeral melodies and volleys of artillery weapons, the remains of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich Romanov and his wife, Anastasia Nikolaevna, were reburied with military honors in Moscow.

 

The remains of the grand couple were transported on 27 April from France and reburied on Thursday in the chapel of the Transfiguration of the Lord in the Bratsk Military Cemetery in the Russian capital.

 

Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of the State Duma and president of the Russian Historical society, noted at the ceremony: "The duke and duchess have returned to their native fatherland and their names have acquired their rightful place in the memory of Russian society."  He said the services of the grand duke as a military and political leader, the supreme commander of all land and naval forces of the Russian empire, cannot be overestimated.

 

"In the years of the First World War, the name of the Grand Duke became the symbol for Russian soldiers and generals and our allies, for Russian society, and for all who linked their national liberation with Russia's victories," S. Naryshkin noted. He said that the fact that Nicholas Nikolaevich spent the last years of his life in France is "symbolic," because the French people "knew well and remembered how the steadfastness of the Russian soldiers on the eastern front helped to keep the enemy from seizing Paris."

 

In his turn, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobianin noted that today's event is not accidental but is another restoration of historical justice.

 

Metropolitan of Volokolamsk Ilarion performed a litany and then the caskets with the remains of the grand duke and his wife were deposited in the chapel.

 

Other participants in the reburial ceremony included Patriarch Kirill, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobianin, State Duma deputies Vladimir Vasiliev, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and Iosif Kobzon, and relatives of the grand duke, specifically Prince Dmitry Romanov and his wife, Dorit.

 

The patriarch said: "Today the dreams of those outstanding sons and daughters of Russia, who died outside the borders of their motherland and dreamed to be buried in their native land, have been realized." He considers it important that this is happening in the year of the 70th anniversary of the victory over fascist Germany. "What we are doing today is a symbolic act or part of an act of overcoming all of the chaos and division that the 20th century brought to our people," the primate said.

 

Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich Junior (1856-1929) was the grandson of Emperor Nicholas I. At the start of the First World War he occupied the post of supreme commander of land and naval forces of the Russian empire, until Nicholas II took his place. From April 1919, Nicholas Nikolaevich lived in Italy and later moved to France, where he headed the Russian All-Military Union. The grand duke died in 1928 in a villa on the French Riviera and was buried in a crypt of the Archangel Michael church in Cannes.  [His wife, Anastasia Nikolaevna, was the daughter of King Nicholas I of Montenegro—tr.] (tr. by PDS, posted 1 May 2015)


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