Remains of Russian empress sail for St Petersburg

[stu]

By Martin Burlund

Sat Sep 23, 1:42 PM ET

 

 

 

ROSKILDE, Denmark (Reuters) - A ship carrying the remains of the mother of Russia's last tsar set sail on Saturday from Denmark for Russia, where they will be laid to rest next to her late husband in accordance with her wishes.

 

The reburial of Empress Maria Fyodorovna, mother of Nicholas II, has been postponed several times because of a Russian-Danish row over a Chechen conference held in Denmark in 2002 and Denmark's release from detention of a Chechen rebel envoy.

 

Danish Queen Margrethe II sat opposite family members of the Danish-born Maria Fyodorovna at a memorial service at Roskilde Cathedral near Copenhagen on Saturday. Some 500 people dressed in black sang muted hymns led by a choir.

 

The coffin was taken by horsedrawn carriage to Copenhagen's Russian Orthodox church, where clergy prayed and performed traditional rituals. It was then taken to Copenhagen Harbour, where a Danish naval ship waited to carry it to St. Petersburg.

 

On September 28, Maria Fyodorovna will be reburied in a crypt next to her husband, Czar Alexander III, in the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg, 140 years to the day after she first arrived in Russia.

 

She was born in 1847 as Princess Dagmar, the daughter of Danish King Christian IX. She changed her name and converted to the Russian Orthodox faith when she married Alexander in 1866.

 

Her son, Czar Nicholas II, was forced to abdicate in 1917 and executed by the Bolshevik revolutionaries who seized power months later. After losing two sons and five grandchildren in the revolution, Maria Fyodorovna left Russia for England in 1919 and later returned to Denmark, where she died in 1928.