Crown Prince Leka and Crown Princess Elia of the Albanians have released several wonderful photographs of the new parents with their daughter Princess Geraldine. Enjoy!
Thursday, October 29, 2020
Monday, October 26, 2020
All In The Family: King Albert and Queen Paola Meet Princess Delphine
On Sunday afternoon, King Albert of Belgium and his wife Queen Paola met with his daughter Princess Delphine at the couple's Belvédère residence.
This is the first time that King Albert has seen his daughter in at least thirty years, and it is the first occasion when Queen Paola has ever met Princess Delphine.
The following statement was released by the king, queen, and princess after the meeting.
This Sunday, October 25, a new chapter opened, filled with emotion, appeasement, understanding and, also, hope.
Our meeting took place at the Château du Belvédère, a meeting during which each of us was able to express, calmly and with empathy, our feelings and our experiences.
After the turmoil, the wounds and the suffering, comes the time for forgiveness, healing and reconciliation. This is the path, patient and at times difficult, that we have decided to take resolutely together.
These first steps open the way which it is now up to us to pursue peacefully.
Delphine, Paola and Albert
Sunday, October 25, 2020
The Grand Ducal House of Hesse – Authoritative review!
To purchase:
“Royal Collections IV. The Grand Ducal House of Hesse” by Arturo E. Béeche and Ilana D Miller. (Eurohistory.com), 324 pages, illustrated throughout.
The Grand Ducal House of Hesse is among the most important of all the German dynasties, providing links to just about every other ruling family in Europe. There are particularly strong ties with Imperial Russia and the Royal family of Britain, which makes for an engrossing read.
The story begins in 1567 when the sons of Landgrave Philipp “the Magnificent” divided his vast lands among themselves. From this territorial division stem all the branches of the Hesse family. The Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt became an independent Duchy that same year.
The early years are a succession of reshuffling of territories, as lands were traded, exchanged or inherited when branches of the family died out. Not until Ludwig IV (died 1626) was primogeniture established.
Darmstadt was also in the front line during various wars. The sons of the house were soldiers and patrons of the arts. Landgrave Ernest Ludwig built Wolfsgarten in the 1720s, which became beloved by later generations.
In 1806 Landgrave Ludwig X became Grand Duke Ludwig I, courtesy of Napoleon and the Confederation of the Rhine. At this time the Old Palace was built.
Schloss Heiligenberg came into the family in the time of Ludwig II. It later became the scene of many family gatherings between the Hesse and Romanov families. Ludwig’s wife Wilhelmine had a second family, believed to be fathered by August Senarclens de Grancy but officially recognised by the Grand Duke as his own. One of these children, Marie, married Alexander II of Russia; the other, Alexander, made a morganatic union with Countess Julie von Hauke and became the ancestor of the Battenberg family.
Ludwig II was succeeded by the childless Ludwig III and it was the latter’s nephew the future Ludwig IV who brought in the British connection when in 1862 he married Princess Alice, second daughter of Queen Victoria. Their daughter Victoria married Alexander and Julie’s son Prince Louis of Battenberg and became the mother of Princess Alice (wife of Prince Andrew of Greece), Queen Louise of Sweden, George the Marquess of Milford Haven and Earl Mountbatten of Burma. Princess Alice of Greece was the mother of the Duke of Edinburgh.
The family of Alice and Ludwig IV suffered tragedy after tragedy. Two daughters, Alix (wife of Nicholas II) and Ella (wife of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich) met their deaths in 1918 at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Ernest Ludwig died just a month before his son George Donatus, his wife Cecile of Greece and their two sons were wiped out in an air crash in thick fog on their way to the wedding of George’s brother Ludwig and Margaret Geddes. Their third child died shortly afterwards from Meningitis. Despite all this Ludwig and Margaret (or Lu and Peg as they were known) devoted themselves to the welfare of the people of Darmstadt, becoming humanitarians and patrons of the arts. Unfortunately, their marriage remained childless and marked the end of the line. The royal turn-out for Peg’s funeral in 1997 shows how popular she was among her adopted family.
The final chapter looks at the women of the Hesse-Darmstadt family (who vastly outnumbered the males). The often-neglected female line provides the ancestors of just about every Royal family in Europe, the daughters of Landgrave Louis IX being particularly active in his respect.
The authors had the advantage of interviews with many members of the extended Hesse family, including the late Countess Mountbatten of Burma and Prince Alfred of Prussia, who provided some fascinating insights into the life of his father Prince Sigismund in Costa Rica. Prince Alfred attended a Eurohistory Conference in California in 2000 (I never forgot the sight of his queuing with the rest of us in a fast food chain).
As usual with Eurohistory, the book is packed with magnificent photos, many of them previously unpublished. They show that there was a lot of mingling between the various branches of the family, something that has often been played down more recently because of the German links The Duke of Edinburgh’s sisters all married Germans and there are some wonderful pictures of Prince Philip with his German relations, which in the U.K. we don’t often see. I found it particularly interesting to see photos of buildings in Darmstadt destroyed in the Second World War and I also spotted a rare image of a smiling Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia among a group on page 135.
The text is authoritative, well researched and easy to read. This work is a “must” for all devotees of European royal history. A fascinating read, highly recommended.
By Coryne Hall
–//–
To order at EUROHISTORY:
To order at AMAZON:
The Grand Ducal House of Hesse
6300 Kensington Avenue
East Richmond Heights, CA 94805
USA
Phone: 510.236.1730
Email: books@eurohistory.com / eurohistory@comcast.net / aebeeche@mac.com
Saturday, October 24, 2020
RECOLLECTIONS – The Memoirs of Victoria Milford Haven off to the printer!
It is with much anticipation and a great sense of accomplishment that we at EUROHISTORY announce the release to the printer of our latest book, in fact our 33rd book!
RECOLLECTIONS – The Memoirs of Victoria Milford Haven, Formerly Princess Louis of Battenberg promises to be yet another must-have in the long line of books published by our small publishing house.
Expanded and annotated by Ilana D. Miller and Arturo E. Beéche the book contains the memoirs of one of the most intriguing and exceptional granddaughters of Queen Victoria: Victoria, Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven.
Born Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine in 1863, she became one of her English grandmother's most frequent correspondents, as well as a surrogate mother to her younger siblings after the untimely death in 1878 of their mother, Grand Duchess Alice of Hesse. Married in 1884 to her father's first cousin, Prince Louis of Battenberg, Victoria soon became a witness to some of the most momentous historical episodes of her lifetime. Her thoughts (open, frank, no-nonsense, clear) are to be found inside the 280-page book containing her memoirs, her "recollections." The book has been handsomely illustrated with nearly 400 exquisite images sourced from various archives, family collections, as well as the incomparably vast EUROHISTORY Royal Photographic Archive.
We expect RECOLLECTIONS – The Memoirs of Victoria Milford Haven, Formerly Princess Louis of Battenberg out in early December 2020....stay tuned for further purchasing information. As usual, the book will be available at our website:
Our other resellers (Hoogstraten English Bookstore, Librairie Galignani, Amazon. com and Amazon.co.uk) will also have copies for you to conveniently purchase!
6300 Kensington Avenue
East Richmond Heights, CA 94805
USA
Phone: 510.236.1730
Email: books@eurohistory.com / eurohistory@comcast.net / aebeeche@mac.com
Thursday, October 22, 2020
EUROHISTORY, Issue CXXVII – Fall 2020, Volume 23.3 off to print this coming week!
6300 Kensington Avenue
East Richmond Heights, CA 94805
USA
Phone: 510.236.1730
Email: books@eurohistory.com / eurohistory@comcast.net / aebeeche@mac.com
http://www.eurohistory.com
Dear Subscribers and Friends,
As we await the arrival from our printer of Issue CXXVI (Summer 2020), we are about to send to them Issue CXXVII (Fall 2020), Volume 23.3!
You will be happy to know that as we are in-between book projects, we decided too get all the magazines for 2020 finished, Fall and Winter will be ahead of schedule!
Inside EUROHISTORY – Fall 2020, Issue CXXVII subscribers will find the following articles:
1. Aunt Miechen – Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna Sr., by Coryne Hall.
2. The Diamond Duke – Duke Karl II of Brunswick and Lüneburg, by Gert-Juergen Frisch.
3. Who Is In the Photograph: The 80th Birthday of Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, by Ilana D. Miller.
4. Crown Prince Carol in Ceylon, India, and Burma, by Alexander Borg.
5. The Tenuta Reale (Part 2): A Grand Villa in Tuscany for Two Remarkable Infantas of Spain, by Ricardo Mateos Saínz de Medrano.
6. The 60th Wedding Anniversary of Duke Carl and Duchess Diane of Württemberg, by Arturo E. Beéche, Publisher
7. Obituary: "The Red Princes" – Princess Marie-Thérèse of Bourbon-Parma (1933-2020), by Seth B. Leonard.
8. Royal News.
To join us, contact bus at:
Eurohistory
6300 Kensington Avenue
East Richmond Heights, CA 94805
USA
Phone: 510.236.1730
Email: books@eurohistory.com / eurohistory@comcast.net / aebeeche@mac.com
http://www.eurohistory.com
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
The Birth of Princess Geraldine of Albania
HRH Princess Geraldine of Albania was born at 09:30 on Thursday, 22 October, at the Queen Geraldine Maternity Hospital in Tirana. The princess is the first child of Crown Prince Leka and Crown Princess Elia of the Albanians. Both mother and child are doing well.
Princess Geraldine is named for her paternal great-grandmother, Queen Geraldine of Albania (1915-2002; née Countess Apponyi de Nagy-Appony), the wife of King Zog I of Albania. Indeed, Princess Geraldine was born exactly eighteen years after the death of Queen Geraldine, who passed away at Tirana on 22 October 2002.
The princess is the first member of the royal family to be born in Albania since the birth of her grandfather, King Leka I of the Albanians, in 1939.
Congratulations to the Crown Princely Couple!
Monday, October 19, 2020
Grand Duchess Kira Kirillovna of Russia's 1938 Essay About Her Wedding Gown
 |
| Grand Duchess Kira Kirillovna of Russia and Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia Photograph (c) Royal Collection Trust |
by Grand Duchess Kira Kirillovna of Russia
1938, Potsdam, Germany
My wedding dress is a family heirloom. It belonged to my grandmother, the Duchess of Edinburgh, and later Duchess of Coburg, who was an only daughter of Emperor Alexander II.
It came from her own country, from Russia, where it was made for her and where she wore it as a Russian grand duchess.
It is an old court dress of heavy silver brocade richly embroidered, cut low off the shoulders, very slim at the waist; the long sleeves slit open so that the arms are free.
The heavy train hangs from the waist and is three meters long.
The gorgeous embroidery was made by nuns in a convent famous for its exquisite needlework.
This dress, perhaps (and I think surely) the only example of its kind left, is now nearly 100 years old.
It lay for many years without coming to the light of day. The first time it was worn again after the war and revolution was 12 years ago when my sister, Grand Duchess Marie, Princess of Leiningen, was married in it. Now it is to be worn once more; hardly any alterations or touches were necessary to make it fit.
The Russian national headdress, the famous kokoshnik, goes with it, or a diadem, and a long lace veil and silver low heeled shoes.
No modern dress could equal this one in beauty of style or material. It is something unique, belonging to golden days of the past, the past of a great and rich country which supplied the world with so many things of beauty.
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