The last Romanovs the boyars, their necropolis and its siberian connotations

The paper deals with the history of the aristocratic clan of the Romanovs and the Kuchumovichi, or Sheibanyds of Siberia. The focus of the 2013-2015 excavations at the New monastery of the Saviour (Novospasskiy), held by the Institute of Archaeology RAS, was the remains of the relatives of Tsar Mikhail Romanov - brothers and sisters of his father Feodor Nikitich (Filaret the Patriarch). After the death of Ivan the Terrible, the Romanovs clan have become the most powerful group around the throne. Boris Godunov, after his election as a new Tsar, threw them out of the political field. Then, he exiled them. The most dangerous person of the Romanovs was the oldest son of Nikita Romanov, Feodor. He and his wife were enforced to took the vows, their small child Mikhail became an orphan. Four other brothers were exiled to the Northern towns and monasteries. Three of them died there under the very suspicious circumstances. The historians of Romanovs family believe that they were killed by their jailers. The Nikita’s daughters with their husbands of the noblest families, children and relatives were also exiled and some of them died far from Moscow. Two brothers, Vasiliy and Ivan, were sent to Siberian frontier, to the newly established Russian outpost of Pelym. The youngest brother Vasiliy died, but Ivan managed to survive. He and the rest of the clan were returned to their estates in the Central Russia after one year of the exile, in 1601. When Boris the Tsar died and False Dmitry I enthroned, the rest of the Romanovs were given back their high ranks. Ivan Nikitich asked a permission to transmit the remains of his brother Vasiliy from Pelym to the family cemetery of the Romanovs at the Novospasskiy monastery. Step by step the clan members’ corps returned to the monastery and Ivan Nikitich erected the new burial church over their graves as the martyrs. The epitaphs on their grave stones were studied and published since the late 18th c. It happens that simultaneously started the study of the epitaphs of the Siberian khan Kuchum descendants. Both the texts collections were stored by the prominent scholar of the 18th c. Russia, G.F. Muller, deeply involved in the research work of Siberia. His collection was taken for the most reliable; due to it is the oldest of the copies. But the recent investigation of the documents and the excavations of the grave-church in the monastery changed our assessment of the texts collection of G.F. Muller. The cross-analysis revealed that grave inscriptions of the Romanovs and the Kuchumovichy in his famous “Portfolios” are not original but a result of a compilation of the real engravings with the monastic acts as well as other documents, transformed by historians in favor to the Romanovs. Meanwhile, there appeared the new inscriptions of the descendants of Khan Kuchum at their cemeteries of the late 17th c. in Moscow (the widow of Andrei Andreevich Kuchumovich and two their children).

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