Balkan royals

THE Syrian ambassador to Britain is out; so are Britain's last two prime ministers. But readers of this blog will surely be more interested in which members of the various Balkan royal families have made it on to the invitation list for tomorrow's wedding in London between a man from a welfare family and an unemployed woman.

The answer? Four Balkan royal families will be in attendance; two will not. All the Balkan countries are republics, of course, but their royals live on, travelling the cocktail circuit and providing fuel for gossip-mongerers and readers of glossy magazines. Balkan Insight carries a full report here.

The Windsors have always had close ties to the Balkan royals. The husband of the current Queen (and grandfather of Prince William) was born in Corfu as Prince Philip of Greece, and had to renounce his Orthodox Christianity for Anglicanism when he married the then Princess Elizabeth.

Romania’s former King Michael, a 90-year-old great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria, will be at Westminster tomorrow. A third cousin of the Queen, he met his wife Anne in November 1947 at Elizabeth's wedding to Prince Philip. He then returned home, only to be forced to abdicate by the communists a month later. He has spent most of his life in exile in Switzerland, but put in a stint as a chicken farmer in Britain.

Bulgaria’s King Simeon, another distant relation of the Queen, has received an invitation, although his links with Britain and its royals are weaker than some of his fellow Balkan invitees. Simeon lived much of his life in exile in Spain but, from 2001 to 2005, was Bulgaria's elected prime minister.

Prince William's nuptials will also be watched by his godfather Constantine, a former King of Greece and a cousin to Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne. Constantine was forced into exile in 1967 and lives in London.

Constantine was best man at the 1985 London wedding of the now Serbian Crown Princess Katherine, who is Greek, and Serbia’s Crown Prince Alexander. Both will be in London for the wedding tomorrow.

Alexander, who has moved back to Serbia from his exile in London, is a godson of the Queen, whom he calls Lizzie in private. Famously, he was born in 1945, in Room 212 of London’s luxury Claridge's Hotel. But Yugoslav law required that he had to be born on Yugoslav soil in order to become king. Luckily, as the family were in exile in London, Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister, declared the room Yugoslav territory for the day. (The picture above shows a young Alexander with his father.)

The newborn was taken to Westminster Abbey, where he was baptised by Patriarch Gavrilo of Serbia, with Britain’s King George Vl and Princess Elizabeth in attendance. Educated in Britain and the US, Crown Prince Alexander served in the British army and speaks with a pronounced upper-class English accent. A recent BBC report about the Serbian royals includes footage from his baptism.

Unlike the Romanian, Bulgarian and Greek monarchies, which have Germanic roots, the Serbian one was home-grown. The father of the Serbian Karadjordjevic dynasty was Black George, a pig breeder who led the first Serbian uprising against the Ottomans in 1804. The Serbian royal family’s website has some helpful family trees which show their relations to the other royal families of Europe.

The Albanian royal family have not been invited to tomorrow's ceremony. Zog, Albania’s first and only king in modern times, ruled between 1928 and 1939. His son Leka was born two days before the family was forced into exile in 1939, when the country was invaded by Mussolini’s forces. He spent time in Britain, including a stint in the Ritz Hotel.

Then the family moved to Egypt at the invitation of King Farouk, a descendant of the founder of modern Egypt, Muhammed Ali Pasha, an Albanian born in Kavala, which is now in Greece. Leka later became a British army officer, but lived much of his life in South Africa before returning to live in Tirana.

The Montenegrin royals likewise have not made the guest list, perhaps because Crown Prince Nikola Petrovic ll Njegos, who has lived all his life in France, has no obvious British connections. He is the great-grandson of King Nikola, who was deposed in 1918 when Montenegro became part of Yugoslavia and the Karadjordjevics of Serbia assumed the monarchy of the whole country. Nikola was once known as the father-in-law of Europe, with daughters married, most prominently, into the Italian and Russian royal families.

Most of the Balkan royals are, perhaps unsurpsiringly, in favour of a restoration of their monarchies. The subject was debated in Albania, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria after the fall of communism, but the moment for restoration appears to have passed. Still, for at least some Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians and Greeks, the presence of "their" royals in Westminster Abbey tomorrow will be a source of pride, and above all a delicious poke in the eye to any of their neighbours represented by mere ambassadors.