The massive Byzantine-style Church upon the Blood dominates this site where Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and children were murdered by Bolsheviks on the night of 16 July 1918. Nearby, the pretty wooden Chapel of the Revered Martyr Grand Princess Yelizaveta Fyodorovna honours the imperial family’s great-aunt and faithful friend.
The executions took place in the basement of a local engineer’s house, known as Dom Ipatyeva (named for its owner, Nikolai Ipatyev). During the Soviet period, the building housed a local museum of atheism, but it was demolished in 1977 by then governor Boris Yeltsin, who feared it would attract monarchist sympathisers, and for many years the site was a vacant block marked by a small cross and the wooden chapel to Grand Princess Yelizaveta Fyodorovna. Yelizaveta Fyodorovna was a pious nun who met an even worse end than the other Romanovs when she was thrown down a mine shaft, poisoned with gas and buried.
