Search for the Romanovs' resting place at Ganina Yama after Prince Golitsyn's 1976 trip

In 1976 Prince Golitsyn attempted to reconstruct the picture of the murder of the Imperial Family and visited Yekaterinburg. But finding the mines into which the bodies of the Romanovs had been thrown proved far from easy. Local residents refused to say where the iron mines were situated, to which the bodies of the Tsar's martyrs had been carried from the Ipatiev House. That place was Ganina Yama.

In time, the very mine into which the murdered had been thrown was established only with the help of aerial photography and geological surveys. To the astonishment of the search team, at the place of the Romanovs' last repose, within a radius of several metres, valuables belonging to the Tsar's family lay scattered: the Empress's earrings, fragments of precious vestments, diamonds. Today these objects are held in the museums of Yekaterinburg and in the churches raised in memory of the martyrs' death of Nicholas II, his wife and children.

Today the men's Monastery of the Holy Royal Martyrs stands at Ganina Yama. Every year tens of thousands of pilgrims gather here from all over the world to honour the memory of the martyred family and to walk the Tsar's Way from Yekaterinburg to Ganina Yama.