Darwin hosts royal funeral as Russian Tsar’s great-grandson dies

The funeral of Leonid Gurevich Kulikovsky, the reclusive great-grandson of Russian Tsar Alexander III, has taken place in Darwin after he lived his final years in obscurity and alone with his dog in an Outback trailer park where he was known by locals as Old Nick.

Romanov Winter Palace, St Petersburg. Image by Dennis Jarvis / CC BY-SA 2.0

Kulikovsky – a 72-year-old direct descendent of the penultimate Russian tsar and a distant relative of the Queen – died of a suspected heart attack on September 27 while walking his dog at his home in the northern territory town of Katherine, Darwin’s honorary Russian consul Simon Andropov said.

His body had remained in a hospital morgue since then while authorities searched for his family. They found a sister in Kulikovsky’s birthplace of Denmark. She then informed the Russian Orthodox Church in Australia that a member of the royal Romanov family exiled after the 1917 revolution was dead on Australia’s northern frontier, Mr Andropov said.

(Press Association)