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Expedition to trace route of Czar Nicholas II’s family from Tyumen to Tobolsk

The action is dedicated to the 400th anniversary of the Imperial House of the Romanovs

TYUMEN, August 4 (Itar-Tass) – An expedition of history connoisseurs and professional historians starts off from Tyumen on Saturday to repeat the route traversed 95 years ago by the family of the dislodged Russian Czar Nicholas II.

The action is dedicated to the 400th anniversary of the Imperial House of the Romanovs, which will be marked in February 2013. It has been organized by the Tyumen region tourism center Azimut.

The expedition party is not big and it consists of school students, who won various inter-school competitions, and local historians.

The starting point is the Czar’s Quay. It was on August 4, 1917, that czar’s family started a trip to exile in the olden West-Siberian town of Tobolsk.

“August 7, 1917. We got over the Ural Mountains and felt the cold air,” Nicholas II wrote in this diary. “The train passed Yekaterinburg in the small hours of morning. It dragged on and on incredibly slowly, so that we arrived in Tyumen only at 11:30 pm.”

“The train pulled in almost to the quay and the only thing we had to do was to board a ship,” the Czar went on,“ Nicholas II wrote.

“Then the reloading of cargo began and it went on all through the early morning,” his diary says. “We departed from Tyumen by the river at around 6.00 a.m.”

Participants in the current expedition will not be able to traverse the whole route by water, as the river Tura has become considerably shallower over the past century.

At a certain distance away from Tyumen, the expedition members will get over to busses, said Lyudmila Bekdairova, the director of the Azimut center

On the way, they will visit the village of Pokrovskoye where they will familiarize themselves with a museum devoted to Grigory Rasputin.

Upon reaching the township of Khudyakovo, the expedition will again move to a diesel-powered ship will continue the trip to Tobolsk.

According to Bekdairova, this mission is not only a pleasant trip from one city to another.

“We wanted to feel the same emotions that Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their five children experienced on the way to Tobolsk.

“The children courageously withstood the hardships of that journey to full uncertainty together with their parents, and Crown Prince Alexis tormented by disease /leukemia/ was only thirteen years old, but he also endured all hardships like a grownup man,” Bekdairova said.

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