The Russian Orthodox Church is planning to canonize the remaining two siblings, but they all want to be sure of the ancestry of the bodies before the 100th anniversary of their deaths in 2018.
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Russian investigators exhumed the remains of the country’s last emperor Nicholas II and empress Alexandra as part of a new probe into the notorious 1918 slaying of the Romanov family.
In July, the church urged that the case be reopened ahead of the centenary of the murder, so that all the members of the family might be buried together.
The remains of the czar, his wife and three of their children were uncovered in a mass grave in 1991. “These people have been canonised, and if their remains are found they will be considered holy relics that believers will pray to”.
Investigators also took samples from bloodstains on the uniform of Nicholas II’s grandfather, Emperor Alexander II, who was assassinated by a bombing in 1881.
The new investigation also involves taking samples from Alexandra’s sister the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna, buried in Jerusalem.
Archive footage shows clergy members of the Russian Orthodox Church walking in procession with Tzar Nicholas II, his wife Czarina Alexandra and their family in Moscow in August 1912.
The church somewhat reluctantly allowed the family’s remains to be interred in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.
US armed forces geneticist Michael Coble, who worked on identifying the 2007 remains, wrote a thorough and kind of annoyed-sounding chronicle of all the testing that’s been done so far, dismissing some other scientists’ “feeble attempts to discredit these studies with contaminated data” and concluding, “It is now time to put this controversy to rest”.
Revolutionary Bolsheviks killed the family in a cellar.
Although previous investigations have confirmed the identity of all seven Romanovs, the Russian Orthodox Church still doubts the authenticity of the remains.
The Investigative Committee, a state body, says new checks are needed in order to authenticate the remains of those two.
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Vladimir Putin’s prime minister Dmitry Medvedev has led efforts to give them a civilised burial 97 years after they were shot dead, but this will only now happen after the next forensic tests.
