Cathedral Planned For Execution Site

Work is expected to begin within a month on a cathedral on the site where Communists executed Russia's Czar Nicholas II and his family in 1918, a news agency reported Friday.
Despite financial difficulties, preparatory work has already started in the city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains region 900 miles east of Moscow, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.
Chief engineer Vladimir Grachev was quoted as saying that plans call for a five-domed cathedral, which would include a replica of the basement room where Nicholas, his wife, Alexandra, their five children and servants were killed by a firing squad on July 17, 1918.
The house where the imperial family was killed was torn down in the 1970s by the Soviet authorities.
Parts of the bodies were exhumed in 1991 and reburied in St. Petersburg in 1998. Two of the children's bodies are missing.
The Russian Orthodox Church is considering canonizing the family. The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which split with the Moscow-based bishops in the 1920s over their support for the atheist Soviet government, has already done so.