Royal Romances by Leslie Carroll

Author:Leslie Carroll [Carroll, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101607121
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-11T04:00:00+00:00

Catherine spent the next several days weeping, convinced that she would never be able to survive without him. “Prince Potemkin did me a cruel turn by dying! The whole burden falls on me.”

“How can I replace Potemkin?” she lamented to her secretary, Alexander Khrapovitsky. “He was a real nobleman, a clever man, no one could buy him. Everything will be wrong….”

As the days passed, Khrapovitsky could only report, “Tears and despair…tears…more tears.” On December 12, continuing to grieve, Catherine confided to Grimm, “I am still profoundly afflicted by it. To replace him is impossible, because someone would have to be born as he was, and the end of this century announces no geniuses….”

Potemkin’s funeral was held at Jassy. He had wanted to be buried in his birthplace at Chizhova, but Catherine played the empress card and decided that his final resting place should be at one of his Crimean cities. She settled on Kherson, where Potemkin’s body arrived on November 23, 1791. As if he were a royal, his heart and viscera were removed and buried elsewhere: His organs, including his brain, rest beneath the floor before the Hospodor of Moldavia’s red velvet medieval throne. Potemkin’s heart was supposed to have been placed under the throne of St. Catherine’s in Kherson, but there’s no trace of it there. The villagers of Chizhova believe it was taken there in 1818 by Archbishop Ivov Potemkin.

After Catherine’s death in November 1796, her son commanded the destruction of Potemkin’s tomb, but apparently his orders were botched. The marble monument that Catherine had commissioned wasn’t completed at the time of her demise, so the prince rested in an unmarked grave, and perhaps the emperor Paul’s lackeys never found it. The grave was desecrated during the Russian Revolution of 1918, and Potemkin’s corpse was as defiled as that of Madame de Maintenon during the French Revolution.

In 1930, a writer and native of Kherson, returning to his hometown for a visit, noticed Potemkin’s skull and burial clothes displayed behind glass in the “Anti-Religious Museum.” He sent a telegram to the ministry responsible for protecting art, and Potemkin was reburied.

On May 11, 1984, his coffin was exhumed and analyzed. Some additional items had found their way into the more modern casket, such as a British officer’s Crimean War–era epaulette, but forensic tests concluded that the body was Potemkin’s. In July 1986, the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed. It was confirmed that the coffin dated to 1930. It was also supposed that any icons that would have been buried with Potemkin’s body had disappeared during the looting of the Russian Revolution. At St. Catherine’s Cathedral in Kherson, Potemkin was reinterred for the final time, with a proper headstone.

Everything about Potemkin had been larger than life. Leonine, broad chested, well over six feet tall, the prince, known across Russia as Serenissimus, had coruled the empire with Catherine for seventeen years. They had met three decades before his death during a time of crisis, and a gallant gesture sealed their combined destiny.

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