TYUMEN, Russia, Aug. 4 (UPI) -- A group of historians and students set off Saturday from Tyumen to retrace the journey that the last Russian czar, Nicholas II, made to exile in Siberia.
The party left Czar's Quay in Tyumen by boat, ITAR-Tass reported. Nicholas and his family left Tyumen east of the Urals after a three-day train trip that began Aug. 4, 1917.
"The train pulled in almost to the quay and the only thing we had to do was to board a ship," Nicholas wrote in his diary, describing the arrival in Tyumen just before midnight on Aug. 7. "Then the reloading of cargo began and it went on all through the early morning," his diary says. "We departed from Tyumen by the river at around 6.00 a.m."
The family spent months in Tobolsk, about 100 miles southwest of Tyumen. They traveled the entire way by boat, but the modern group had to complete the trip by bus because the Tura River has become shallower.
The royal family was transferred to a house in Yekaterinburg in the Urals in April 1918. Nicholas, his wife, son, daughters and some of their servants were shot in the basement of the house on July 17, 1918.
Saturday's trip also included a stop at the birthplace of Grigori Rasputin, the mystic Russian Orthodox monk who convinced the czarina he could heal her son, Czarevitch Alexei, who suffered from hemophilia.
