Prince Dimitri Romanov, a claimant to the headship of the House of Romanov, died in Denmark yesterday evening. His wife, Princess Feodora (née Dorrit Revetlow) said he was taken to hospital last week due to a “dramatic decline in health.” She has confirmed he died on the evening of 31 December 2016.

Prince Dmitri was born on 17 May 1926 in Cap d’Antibes in France as the second son of Prince Roman Petrovich of Russia and Countess Praskovia Sheremeteva. His older brother was Prince Nicholas Romanovich. He was the great-great-grandson of Emperor Nicholas I of Russia and Princess Charlotte of Prussia. His family moved to Italy in 1936 and in 1946 they moved to Egypt. He moved to Denmark in 1960, shortly after his marriage to Johanna von Kauffman in 1959. He was widowed in 1989, and he remarried to Dorrit Reventlow in 1993. They married in Russia, and it was the first a Romanov had married there since the fall of the dynasty.

He worked for a number of banks in Denmark, including the Danske Bank where he was an executive until he retired in 1993. Since then he had been involved in charity, and he served as the chairman of the Romanov Fund for Russia since its creation. He has also been a member of the Romanov Family Association since 1979. He attended the funeral of Emperor Nicolas II and some of his family in 1998. Two of Emperor Nicolas II’s children are still not buried with their family.

He was also a part of the campaign that arranged for the remains of Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (née Princess Dagmar of Denmark) to be moved from Denmark, where she died in exile, to Russia to be buried with her husband Emperor Alexander III. He accompanied her remains to Russia.

In 2014 he succeeded his brother as a disputed claimant of the Headship of House of Romanov. The other claimant is Maria Vladimirovna, Grand Duchess of Russia and the dispute is mostly due to disagreements over the validity of dynasts’ marriages. As a descendant of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, he was also in the line of succession to the British throne.

His claim to the Headship of the House of Romanov is passed to British-born Prince Andrew Romanov, a distant cousin and also a descendant of Emperor Nicholas I of Russia and Princess Charlotte of Prussia.