Yekaterinburg, May 30, 2016
A section of Tolmacheva Street in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg where there are no residential buildings has been renamed "Tsarskaya Street," reports Interfax-Religion on Monday with reference to the administration of the city's Kirovsky district.
The famous Church on the Blood stands on Tolmacheva Street of Yekaterinburg. Earlier the house of the engineer Ipatiev stood on this site, and it was there that the family of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II was martyred in 1918. Late in November 2015 members of the commission for city names in Yekaterinburg decided to rename the street.
Among other options considered by the commission were "Romanovskaya," "Nikolaevskaya" and "Ipatievskaya." However, the commission members unanimously voted in favor of the name "Tsarskaya." At the same time an opinion poll among residents of Tolmacheva Street was conducted and the majority of them spoke out against the renaming.
In 2000 the Jubilee Council of the Hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia with the Royal Family – Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna and their five children – at their head. In February 2016 the doctor of the imperial family Eugene Botkin was canonized as well. The supposed remains of the members of the royal family were interred in the vault of the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul within the fortress of the same name in St. Petersburg in 1998.
The members of the Russian imperial family along with Eugene Botkin and three servants were martyred on the night of July 17, 1918, in the house of the engineer Ipatiev in Yekaterinburg. Since September 2012 on the night of the seventeenth of every month a Divine Liturgy is celebrated at the Church on the Blood in honor of All Saints Who Shone Forth in the Russian Lands which was built on the site of the royal family’s martyrdom. In addition to that, a cross procession which gathers tens of thousands of believers is held from the Church on the Blood to Ganina Yama (“Ganya Pit”) Monastery (21 kilometers/c.13 miles from Yekaterinburg) annually on the night of July 17 at the end of the service.
