ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, May 16 -- The prince of Wales arrived in St. Petersburg Monday to offer advice on how the historic city can safeguard and enhance its cultural heritage and public service institutions.
Prince Charles began this first visit to Russia by a member of the British Royal family since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution with a tour of the Peter and Paul Fortress and Cathedral, the traditional burial site of Russia's Romanov dynasty.
Prince Charles's four-day visit followed an invitation from Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, who said the impending ruin of Russia's second largest city would result in the loss of a significant part of world culture.
Inside the cathedral, at the burial site of Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, the heir to the Russian throne who died in 1992, Charles asked Sobchak when the remains of Russia's last Czar Nicholas II would be buried.
Sobchak replied that the ceremony to bury Nicholas, who was executed together with his wife, children and servants by a Bolshevik hit squad in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg in 1918, would take place this fall.
'There are still some questions regarding the ceremony and the sarcophagus, but they are of a purely technical nature,' the mayor said.
The final burial of Nicholas II, whose wife Alexandra Fyodorovna was a granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria, could pave the way for an official state visit by Queen Elizabeth II to Russia by the end of the year.
Prince Charles, surrounded by bodyguards and a horde of journalists, looked at the tombs of Romanov Czars such as Peter the Great and Paul I and complimented workers busy restoring an 18th century ornamental table.
Security was surprisingly lax, and Roman Yurinov, a high-rise restorer who works on the Peter and Paul Cathedral's 122 meter high steeple, got close enough to the prince for an autograph and a chat.
Outside the walls of the fortress, one of the first buildings to be constructed by Peter the Great when he founded the city in 1703, Prince Charles looked out over the Neva River to the Winter Palace, home of the world-famous Hermitage Museum.
His guide, Peter and Paul museum curator Natalya Dementyeva, told him the cannons which boom every day at noon from the fortress walls sometimes set off the museum's alarm system and she gets calls asking it they can't fire more quietly.
'You haven't shattered any of their windows yet?' the prince asked.
Later, while stepping into his limousine amidst a crowd of well- wishers, one old Russian man greeted him with the words 'Long live the King!' 'We need a monarchy like we need air,' the man said later, clearly thrilled to have glimpsed royalty.
Prince Charles spent Monday evening attending a performance of Peter Tchaikovsky's opera 'The Queen of Spades' at the Marinsky Theater, formerly the Kirov.
The idea for Charles' visit to Russia's second city came after Sobchak wrote to him last year expressing concern at what he called the catastrophe facing St. Petersburg, known as Leningrad for much of the past 70 years.
Charles responded in December by sending out a team of experts in health care, heritage and tourism under his Business Leaders Forum as a prelude to his own visit to Russia's former imperial capital.
The forum, which has been working in St. Petersburg since December, is dedicated to mobilizing western investment in business partnerships with Russians to help regenerate business and culture in the city.
During his trip, the heir to the British throne is scheduled to attend the official opening of Britain's first consulate in St. Petersburg and a branch of the British Council.
He is also due to lay a wreath at the Piskaryev cemetery, where the World War II victims of the 900-day German blockade of Leningrad are buried.
Other stops on the tour, the first by a prince of Wales since King Edward VII visited Russia 100 years ago, include addresses to business leaders and a tour of Pavlovsk Palace, where many of St. Petersburg's cultural treasures are stored.
Charles was also scheduled Tuesday to tour the city's largest hospital, the Marinskaya, which faces serious funding problems as it tries to treat around 5 million people, many of them elderly.
'I hope we might be able to bring people together to see that there are areas that can be tackled on the cultural and humane point of view,' Charles said in a British Broadcast Corp. interview broadcast Monday prior to his departure.
The prince said the potential social programs St. Petersburg could adopt via the private sector would 'make an enormous difference in terms of making people realize that business itself and capitalism generally does have a concern and a compassionate face.'
