⠀OH SO ROMANOV

Tsar Nicholas II of Russia reading the Sunday edition of the С.-Петербургскія Вѣдомост on April 4 (16), 1899. He's sitting in his wife's Mauve Room at the Alexander Palace. You can read this newspaper (and read exactly what Nicholas was reading that day) here. You can also read all the С.-Петербургскія Вѣдомост for the year of 1899 here [and search for other years as well].

In his diary, of this day he wrote:

April 4th. Sunday. It snowed during the night, but in the afternoon it all melted. The four of us went to mass, Tatiana until half of the service and Olga until the end. After breakfast, the two of us went for a ride, then for a walk. Yesterday, I killed one crow, today - three. The three of us had lunch with Sergey and listened to our music.

Portrait of a baby Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia.

From the diary of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, 1896: S. Ilyinskoe. Thursday, May 30th. The Tsar and the Tsarina soon returned from a walk. Their child, a sweet, fat, round-faced girl, was carried around the garden in a wheelchair; then the Empress took her on her lap, she smiled at me and toyed with my watch chain. I picked her up.

In the personal collection of jewellery of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, there was a pearl-ruby sautoir with a removable pendant, presented to her by Emperor Nicholas II in late 1900.

In early October 1900, by order of Nicholas II, the Volga-Kama Merchant Bank transferred 80,000 German marks from the Tsar’s personal funds to the Empress's brother, Grand Duke Ernst of Hesse.

On 30th October, a box with five seals arrived in St. Petersburg from Darmstadt. The Empress liked the necklace very much and wore it often, as evidenced by numerous photographs during the early 20th century.

In August 1917, the Empress took this necklace, among other items of jewellery, when she and her family were sent into exile. It was discovered in 1933 in Tobolsk among 154 other precious objects and was described under No141 as "a belt of small pearls with 11 large rubies, studded with diamonds and additional rubies, worth 75,000 rubles."

OTMA enjoying their 1905 summer. The Romanov children frequently swam, waded, and relaxed on the beach of the Gulf of Finland right outside the Lower Dacha. Because the palace sat directly on the shoreline, the family treated the stone-and-sand beach as their private backyard. 

Other photos show OTMAA throughout the years sitting on the shoreline rocks, building sandcastles, and wading into the shallow coastal waters.

Tsar Nicholas II was highly active and also loved kayaking right off the Lower Dacha shore. He encouraged his children to be equally physically active, teaching them to row and paddle.