Equine Requiem

French writer Jean Louis Gouraud has been able to save a unique cemetery for the horses of the czars. As many as 120 headstones remain, such as for Beauty, who “served his imperial majesty Nicholas I for 24 years.” Another marks the resting place of the favorite mount of Alexander III. The Tsarskoye Selo cemetery, in Pushkin, Russia, was slated for development when Gouraud found it. He was able to raise $40,000 to preserve the plots. “They were considered to be deserving servants of the empire,” says Yekaterina Turova of the new Tsarskoye Selo museum, but the communist government wasn’t interested in maintaining such grand monuments to emperors’ memories. (AFP) ...And all the Czar’s horses, and all the Czar’s men, watched the Soviet separation begin.