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Filipino’s grandmama could be Russia’s Anastasia

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The picture at left is that of the writer’s “Grandmama Tasia” when she was a young girl. The one at right is the portrait of the young Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov of Russia, which she found on the Internet. 

She said her name was Tasia. And her last name was always a cause for family debates, because it irritated her no end that no one in our family could pronounce it properly. To our Filipino ears, it sounded like Kazzuhina, so that is how we said it and spelled it, much to her chagrin. It didn’t help that she would write it down in Cyrillic, the alphabet she grew up with, which added more to the confusion.

ON A RARE outing, a vacation in Baguio, in front of Hyatt Terraces

She told us this much: that she was 18 when she arrived in the Philippines after spending months on a ship from Russia, escaping the Bolshevik Revolution when it escalated in 1918. Handed over to the ship captain by family members for safekeeping, she was locked in her cabin for her safety, isolated from all other Russian passengers fleeing the revolution.

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