To the right of the altar in the Church of St Job of the Many Sufferings in Brussels a plaque in the wall lists the names of the Romanov family. It begins with the words: "Tsar Martyr, Nikolai II, Alexandrovich, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias". Next in line is the "Tsaritsa Martyr Alexandra Fyodorovna," and the list continues in archaic Cyrillic script with the names of the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolayevich and the Grand Duchesses: Olga, Tatyana, Maria and Anastasia. To the descendants of the loyal subjects of Nicholas II who fled Russia after defeat in the civil war, this is no mere memorial tablet. Cemented into the church's walls, they believe, are the mortal remains of the imperial Russian family, put to death by the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg in July 1918 and canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile 17 years ago.
Thousands of miles away in Russia a cache of bones exhumed in Yekaterinburg in the summer of 1991 has been declared categorically to be those of the same Romanovs, though the remains of one daughter - either Maria or Anastasia - and of the boy Tsarevich are not among them.
The bones in Russia have been subjected to DNA testing and compared positively with a blood sample given by Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, a close relative of the German-born Tsaritsa. The Russian Orthodox Church in Exile, formed by the priests and bishops who fled the revolution, will have no truck with what they call the "Yekaterinburg Bones". On a table near the entrance to St Job's a leaflet lets the faithful know the church's position as expressed by its chief bishop, Metropolitan Vitaly of Eastern America and New York.
Uncompromisingly, Metropolitan Vitaly attacks the recent decision of the Russian government's scientific commission to declare that the "Yekaterinburg Bones" are the genuine remains of the family. "The Russian Orthodox Abroad," he says, "will never recognise the remains discovered in Yekaterinburg as `imperial'." In declaring them as such the Russian government commission had, Metropolitan Vitaly said, "committed a blasphemy in the eyes of the entire Orthodox world by proposing the veneration of false relics".
In a ceremony not seen in Moscow since the days of Peter the Great, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, regarded by the Church in Exile as infected by contact with the KGB and by ecumenism, will convene its Holy Synod tomorrow to decide if it should canonise the imperial family as martyrs and recognise the Yekaterinburg bones as their remains.
At first sight the claims of the Russian emigrant communities and their church seem to be far outweighed by those of the government commission and its expert DNA testing of the Yekaterinburg bones. But the matter is more complicated than it initially appears and has led to bitter recriminations on all sides. There is some historical evidence that the Brussels remains may be genuine and there are some doubts within the government commission itself about the Yekaterinburg bones.
To get the situation into perspective, it is necessary to look back to the dark days of the Russian civil war in which 10 million people are believed to have died. In July 1918 in Yekaterinburg Tsar Nicholas II, Tsaritsa Alexandra, the Tsarevitch Alexei, the four grand duchesses Olga, Tatyana, Maria and Anastasia, were brought, with the family doctor Yevgeny Botkin, Alexandra's maid Anna Demidova, the family's cook Kharitonov, and the Tsar's valet Trupp, to the basement of the Ipatiev House where they were detained.
Their captor, the Bolshevik Yakov Yurovsky, told them they would be photographed. Instead, as they lined up against the wall, they were shot dead. Their bodies were taken away, mutilated, soaked with sulphuric acid and buried in a mass grave outside the city.
Eight days later the White forces evicted the Reds from Yekaterinburg and their leader, Admiral Kolchak, appointed Nikolai Sokolov, an experienced investigator, to find the remains of the imperial group. Sokolov found some bones and congealed human fat at the site known by locals to have been the burial place.
When the Reds fought back and seemed likely to re-take Yekaterinburg, Sokolov fled eastward with a box containing the remains he had found. He sailed westwards on a French ship from Vladivostok to Venice and brought the remains to the French riviera where he offered them to the Tsar's cousin, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich. In order not to offend the Tsar's mother, who had escaped to Denmark and believed the family to be still alive, the Grand Duke refused to accept the box. Sokolov then offered the remains to another cousin of the Tsar, King George V of England. The king, who is detested by Russian emigres for refusing to grant sanctuary to the tsar and his family when they were alive, also refused to accept the remains offered by Sokolov.
These remains were then given to the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile and were until now thought to have been kept in Sokolov's box, out of public view, at the Church of St Job in Brussels. The church's parish priest, Father Nikolai Semyonov, told me categorically that the remains have been cemented into the walls of the church. "No-one is quite sure where they are," he says. "They had to be concealed for fear that the communists would get their hands on them." Any hopes, therefore, of submitting the remains - believed to consist of fragments of bone, two bottles of fat, some earth soaked in blood and a number of bullets - for scientific testing are remote in the extreme.
The story of the Yekaterinburg bones broke in July 1991 and was one of the first I wrote for The Irish Times when I was this newspaper's correspondent in Moscow. Two amateur archaeologists in Yekaterinburg announced that they had found the remains of Nicholas II and his family. Intensive investigations began. The son of the executioner Yurovsky was discovered and he produced a handwritten document left to him by his father. The "Yurovsky Note", as it is now known, states the whereabouts of the Romanov remains, which became widely known as the White armies approached Yekaterinburg. The bodies were, therefore, exhumed and buried in a different place further from the city. The investigator Sokolov, it has been argued, went to the original burial place and found some of the remains that had been left behind following the exhumation. The rest of the bones, according to those who support the government commission, were found later and constitute the cache from which the DNA was compared with that of Prince Philip and others.