There are two ways in which I could begin this post. 1) Isn’t it sometimes ironic to find out what kind of historic events of the past took place on the same day as your birthday? Ironic as it is, I was born on the 16^th of July, which just happens to be the very same day that the Bolsheviks decided to bring down the Tsar and his family into the basement of the house in Yekaterinburg where they were held prisoners and execute them in 1918. Or 2) Isn’t it sometimes ironic to find out what events/things some places are famous for? Ironic as it is, Yekaterinburg has made its way into world history – and, successively, to world fame – by being the site of the execution of the Tsar family by the Bolsheviks on the 16^th of July 1918. The last Tsar to rule «Российская империя» was, as most of you probably already know, Nikolay II Romanov. Some of you may also know that he was married to a German princess – Aleksandra Feodorovna – and had five children, four girls and one boy, the youngest, and also the one to have inherited the thrown in the future; царевич Алексей Николаевич [tsarevich Alexei Nikolayevich]. After abducting from the thrown the Tsar and his family was, quite unlike their official request to be allowed to live as ordinary citizens on Crimea, exiled to Siberia. They were sent to the same town to which the first generation of Russian revolutionaries was exiled – Tobolsk. Tobolsk was and is still a very beautiful, cultured and highly educated Siberian city. The Tsar family spent a long time under house-arrest in a big house located in the very center of the then Siberian capital. The house is still preserved in perfect condition [I’ve walked past it one January day when it was minus 30] and serves as a government institution. In April, however, the Tsar and his family were moved from Tobolsk to Tiumen on horses, and from Tiumen to Yekaterinburg by train. In Yekaterinburg they were kept in one of the few houses with plumbing. On the 16^th they were executed, and on the night of the 17^th their bodies were brought 15 kilometers outside of Yekaterinburg, to a place called «Ганина Яма» [Ganina Yama; ‘Gana’s hole’], where they were buried in an old mine. The family constituted of seven people, but killed with them were also two servants. Up until last summer two bodies – those of the youngest children, Alexei and Maria – had not been found and therefore the seven bodies that ‘surfaced’ [let’s leave it at that as the history here is far to complicated for blogging] during гласность have yet to be approved as the true remains of the Tsar family by the Russian Orthodox Church. Remains of two bodies were found not far from the site last summer, and a year later it has been affirmed that those bodies are related to those found earlier. As a church was constructed on the site where the house in which the family was kept during 2000-2003, so a male monastery has been built around the old mine. In Ganina Yama there are seven churches all in all. They are all made out of wood; and it is one the most gorgeous sites in all of Russia, as I’ve tried to show you on this collage:

Of course I should’ve visited this site a long time ago, being as it is that I have lived in Yekaterinburg for over two years now. But it wasn’t until last Saturday that I went there, mainly because I don’t have a car and there are no regular buses that go there. This week my faculty at the university had a conference in literary theory, and as a nice way of ending the conference, everyone who took part was invited to go on a guided tour there on a rented bus. I went, and so did my Korean roommate and my American former roommate. As the whole area belongs to the monastery, every woman has to wear a scarf and put a skirt on over her pants. For some reason, even though it goes against my Lutheran-feminist nature, I like this ritual of ‘dressing humbly’ before God. I love Orthodox churches. To me they are the height of beauty, the place where human strives to meet God in every way possible and where they – in my strictly personal opinion – meet in icons. I know this goes against my Lutheran-Swedish upbringing, but I just can’t resist the mystery of the Russian icons… And all the gold. Of course, one may wonder: was this what Jesus had in mind? Probably not – but why not? Though I at first was very disturbed by the whole thing, the fact that it was murder of a whole family, I settled down after a while and took in the stillness of the place. I recommend everyone to go there, if you’re ever in the Urals, that is. It is a very nice place for prayer. And the power of prayer is underestimated by the modern/western human being.