Download RBTH Daily app for free to be up to date with what’s new in Russia. Get a fresh and brief digest every day.
Follow the link to learn more
“We just knew him as Leonard,” said the former boss of the late Leonid Kulikovsky, a man who died of a heart attack this September, in Katherine, a town in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT).
Ivan Pavlovec had been unaware that his former employee had been a descendant of Russia’s Romanov dynasty and a distant relative of England’s royal family. Leonid Kulikovsky was the great-grandson of Alexander III. He was the son of Gury Kulikovsky, whose mother was Grand Princess Olga, the youngest daughter of Alexander III, Russia’s penultimate emperor and father of Nicholas II.
“I remember him as a modest man, who always had a smile,” Pavlovec said, as he recalled how Kulikovsky had worked at Sydney’s (then) Water Board, in a manual job, which had mostly involved unblocking sewers. He had been an employee there from 1980 to 2006.
“He loved animals and reading,” Pavlovec said. “He was a calm and peaceful gentleman, who kept to himself,” he continued. “He was liked by everybody.”
Pavlovec added that Kulikovsky had stringy, long, grey hair and a moustache, and had lived alone in Sydney’s Blacktown area, from where he would walk to work, to a depot in Seven Hills.
When Kulikovsky had been preparing for retirement, Pavlovec said he had bought a motorhome and had told his colleagues he was off to see the world.
And it might have been this same adventurous spirit that prompted Kulikovsky to move to Australia in 1967.
According to his sister, Xenia Nielsen, Kulikovsky was born in 1943 in Denmark, and moved with his family to Toronto, Canada, in 1948, where his father worked as a professor of Slavonic languages and history. But after his parents divorced, his mother brought him and his sister and brother back to Denmark in 1956.
Nielsen said her brother was “an average student and a very quiet person.” He didn’t like sport and was interested in politics and chess.
She believed that he had moved to Australia “for better opportunities” and because Danish taxes were too much for a single person.
Nielsen said her mother, who only died in June this year, had visited him in Sydney in the late 1970s, but that they had lost contact with him in the ‘90s, when he had stopped writing. For a decade, they tried to locate him, with the help of the Danish Embassy, but had no luck.
Kulikovsky’s retirement road trip took him as far as Katherine, an outback town, which sits between Arnhem Land and Kakadu. There, Kulikovsky’s motor home was stolen and trashed – an incident which prompted him to settle where he had landed. He started renting a demountable home in Katherine’s North Bank Caravan Park, and lived there with his dog until his death.
According to NT News, he had been known by locals as “Old Nick” – perhaps a reference to his great-grandfather’s son, Nicholas II, Russia’s last emperor, whom the Soviets executed, along with his family, in 1918. By this time, Leonid’s grandmother, Olga Kulikovskaya, together with her mother (Alexander III’s wife Maria Fedorovna) had gone to the Crimea, where Leonid’s father Gury was born. For their safety, in 1920, they fled to Belgrade, from where they moved to Denmark.
Old Nick was known in the caravan park for being friendly, an avid reader, and for walking his dog twice a day. But before his death, nobody in Katherine seemed to know about his family background.
Leonid Kulikovsky' funeral in Australia. Source: Press photo
On the evening of September 27, Kulikovsky’s body was found slumped next to a tree in the caravan park, under the watchful eyes of his dog. The park owner called the police, and they contacted the Danish Embassy.
His body was kept in Darwin’s morgue for several months, it seems, because of difficulties contacting his family. When the local Russian church got wind of his identity, they asked a community representative in Darwin, Simeon Andropov, to do some investigating.
After speaking to the local Coroner’s office, Andropov confirmed that Kulikovsky was a genuine descendant of the Romanovs and that his body was in the city morgue. After getting in touch with Kulikovksy’s sister in Denmark, Andropov set about organising a funeral for someone he had never met.
The ceremony was held, with the support of Australia’s Russian Orthodox Church, on November 30, at Darwin’s Orthodox Serbian Church. It was conducted by the Russian Orthodox Church leader Father Michael Protopopov, and attended by Maxim Raku, from the Russian Embassy; the local Danish Consul, Nikolai Kristrop; and NT’s Multicultural Affairs Minister Peter Styles. Local Russians, Greeks, and Serbs, also came to pay their respects.
Sadly, nobody at the funeral had known Kulikovsky personally. He had no family in Australia, and it is understood, no children. But that evening, a Russian wake was held for him at Andropov’s home.
On the day of the funeral, the Greek-Australian Paspaley family, of Paspaley Pearls, generously offered a gravesite for Kulikovsky in their family plot in Darwin’s General Cemetery. And on December 8, he was laid to rest there by local Greek Orthodox priest Father Joel Xanthos.
When the story of Kulikovsky’s identity hit the local news, his dog Rakky attracted some curiosity. Following NT News’ initial report, many people wrote and called in to find out what had become of the “royal dog”. NT News reported that the RSPCA had rehomed Rakky with a local family within 24 hours of his owner’s death.
