(Paris) Two identical hearses, two light oak coffins side by side: the funerals of the Bogdanoff brothers, who died of COVID-19 six days apart, gathered on Monday at the Church of the Madeleine, in Paris, loved ones and hundreds of people.
The singer Francis Lalanne, who became the voice of the antivax and arrived without a mask, the writer Raphaël Enthoven, the former minister Luc Ferry and the hosts Cyril Hanouna and Julien Lepers were among the relatives who came to say goodbye to Igor and Grichka, the twins the most famous of French television, known for their science fiction show Time X on TF1.
Nearly a thousand anonymous were also present for these popular funerals and open to all, before a burial Wednesday in the strictest privacy in the cemetery of Saint-Lary, the village of their birth.
Mass began around 3 p.m. at the Madeleine church, where Johnny Hallyday’s funeral took place in December 2017. On the mass booklet, a photo of the twins, with this sentence attributed to them: ” in the universe nothing is impossible! “, Noted an AFP journalist.
PHOTO VALERY HACHE, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013
“Igor and Grichka scanned the sky. Their science guided them towards the existence of God, ”the priest underlined in his homily. “You are no longer there but living forever in our heart,” said Amélie de Bourbon-Parme later, addressing her ex-husband Igor Bogdanoff and father of her children.
A family friend, posing as an astrophysicist, regretted that the Bogdanoff brothers’ research had been controversial, stressing that “it had hurt them when they were great scientists”.
In the various speeches of family members and relatives, no allusion was made to the reasons for their death. Unvaccinated, Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff fell ill with COVID-19 around December 15, they were then hospitalized and quickly placed in intensive care under artificial coma.
“Things got worse. It’s fate. They couldn’t be separated any longer… They were surrounded by people in the hospital! Until the end, they gave each other news a few rooms apart… ”, confided last week Amélie de Bourbon-Parme.
Igor Bogdanoff died last Monday at the age of 72, less than a week after his brother Grichka. The twins reached their peak in the 1980s with a futuristic anticipation TV show, before being criticized for the credibility of their work and being taunted for their transformed physique which they themselves called “d. ‘extraterrestrial “.