Leonid Gurevich Kulikovsky, the reclusive great-grandson of Russian Tsar Alexander III, had a funeral on Monday in the northern Australian city of Darwin after living his final years in obscurity and alone with his dog in an Outback trailer park where he was known by locals as Old Nick.
Kulikovsky – a 72-year-old direct descendent of the penultimate Russian tsar and a distant relative of British Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip – died of a suspected heart attack on Sept. 27 while walking his dog at his home in the Northern Territory town of Katherine, Darwin's honorary Russian consul Simon Andropov said.
His body had remained in a hospital morgue since then while authorities searched for his family. They found a sister in Kulikovsky's birthplace of Denmark. She then informed the Russian Orthodox Church in Australia that a member of the royal Romanov family exiled after the 1917 revolution was dead on Australia's northern frontier, Andropov said.
Officials from the Russian church as well as the Russian, Danish and Northern Territory governments were among the 50 people who attended the funeral at Darwin's Serbian Orthodox Church. There is no Russian church in the remote Australian city.
A statement from the Kulikovsky family read at the funeral said they had lost contact with him after he left Denmark to live in Australia in 1967.
He worked at Sydney's water utility and never married or had children, Andropov said.
He was driving around Australia in his retirement when he settled five years ago in Katherine, a cattle centre of 10,000 people located 350 kilometres (220 miles) south of the port town of Darwin and 3,600 kilometres (2,200 miles) northwest of Sydney, Andropov said.
"'Old Nick' they called him, so he didn't even use his proper name," Andropov said. "He lived completely incognito; didn't tell anyone of his heritage or anything. But it seems he was a well-liked fellow, always cheerful."
Kulikovsky's estate could not afford a burial, but a wealthy Darwin family has offered to bury him in a Darwin cemetery, Andropov said.