Feature: Well-preserved body of Russian officer unearthed in Turkey

On a frisky spring day in eastern Turkish town of Ardahan, construction workers unearthed an old Christian coffin which held a well-preserved body of what experts say is an imposing Russian officer.

Lask week, excavation workers on a construction site discovered the casket bearing a Russian orthodox cross in the town of some 100,000 inhabitants near the Georgian and Armenian borders.

According to the Turkish press, the dead man is believed to be a Russian officer, perhaps a general, buried there when the town was under Russian control during the late 19th and early 20th century.

The study into the identity of the corpse is still underway.

"There is in fact some work underway but it is really early to determine all the facts but we are trying to determine his rank in the Russian army. In the past several coffins were found in this region but never in such good preservation form," an official from the Turkish ministry for tourism and culture told Xinhua .

"He might be a Greek officer who served in the Russian army," Levent Kucuk, an associate professor from Ardahan University, told the daily Sabah newspaper, as some Greeks lived in the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire before 1923.

Ardahan was once occupied by the Russian army before it fell back to the modern Turkish republic in 1921.

Necmettin Alp, head of the Kars archaeological museum of Kars, where the unearthed body is being placed, told local reporters that researchers are working hard to identify the corpse.

"The serviceman was buried according to Christian ritual. There were only his body and his clothes and boots in the coffin, nothing else, nothing precious," said Alpa.

"There are three stars and the number 20 is written on his uniform, it is probably his service number," he added. Endit