The Royalty Digest Quarterly will publish in its December issue (4/2010) an insightful interview with HRH Prince Nicholas of Romania, entitled "I see Romania as one big history lesson", in which he speaks about his country, education, his famous grandfather- HM King Michael, plans for the future. Interviewers: Diana Mandache & Valentin Mandac … Read More
This is a post first published on Diana’s blog on royal history. The first photo shows the actual four Balkan monarchs together at a royal event in Serbia this month. The photograph is evocative of the better times of stability enjoyed by this region during the reign of their predecessors, in contrast with the endemic volatility of the last seven decades of republican rule. For Romania, the monarchy has been the most beneficial form of government in this land’s history, a period of organic modernisation and integration with the advanced economies and cultures of Europe. Most of the historic architecture of the region has been developed during the reign of the Balkan monarchs. There is a second photograph in this post taken one century ago, showing the ancestors of the present kings, also gathered together, thus emphasizing even more the continuity, consistency and relevance of the royal era for this region of Europe.
This a rare historical image, the most recent gathering of the Balkan Monarchs, photograph taken on the occasion of the silver wedding anniversary of Crown Prince of Serbia. In the image l to r: King Simeon of Bulgaria, Crown Prince Alexander of Serbia, King Michael of Romani … Read More
Marie Alexandrovna, Grand Duchess of Russia, Duchess of Edinburgh and of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1853-1920) has been the mother of Queen Marie of Romania and great-grandmother of HM King Michael of Romania. This article, by Diana, just published in the UK based magazine “Majesty”, reviews her life through excerpts from her well written correspondence kept at the Romanian archives.
To commemorate the 90th anniversary of the death of Marie Alexandrovna, Grand Duchess of Russia, Duchess of Edinburgh and of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Majesty magazine has just published my article ‘Always Imperial’ in their October 2010 issue. Other articles on royal history contained within this issue: ‘Frankly speaking’ (Prince Francis of Teck) by Adrian Woodhouse, ‘On His Majesty’s Service’ (Duke and Duchess of Windsor) by Robert Prentice. see for m … Read More
On 23 August 1944, King Michael of Romania led the antifascist against the pro-German government, by personally arresting the dictator, marshal Ion Antonescu, a war criminal responsible for the death of hundred of thousands of Romanian and Soviet Jews, who allied the country with Nazi Germany and took it into a hugely disastrous war against the Soviet Union where, by some reckonings, over half a million of Romanian soldiers perished senselessly. The subsequent communist government hijacked the significance of this day claiming the entire merit for themselves and declaring it as the National Day. Nowadays the event is largely forgotten or in the best case ignored by a population that has a low level of education and interest in history, reflected also in the wholesale destruction of the country’s architectural heritage for the purpose of crude property speculation. King Michael, by allying Romania with the democratic powers and the Soviet Union, ensured the shortening of the entire WWII with at least six months, according to western historians, and obtained a better deal for Romania in the subsequent peace negotiations.
In 2008 I published, in the academic magazine “Cold War History”, a review of one of the best books on those events and the personality of King Michael, written by Ivor Porter (“Michael of Romania: The King and the Country”), a former British special operative in those days, who participated directly at the events and is a close friend of His Majesty. He died in 2012 at the age of 98 after an eventful and exemplary life, here is his obituary in the Daily Telegraph). I am extremely fortunate and honoured to have met in the past decade both these two personalities in places like London or Bucharest. The book review below is my humble tribute to HM King Michael and his heroic deeds on this day in 1944:
Cold War History
Vol. 8, No. 4, November 2008, Routledge, pp. 564-565
Michael of Romania: The King and the Country, by Ivor Porter, Stroud, Sutton, 2005, xxi + 328pp.
The relevance of monarchies in modern South-East European history is a subject that is very much underrated by the Western specialists on the region. The Balkan monarchs made crucial contributions to the process of state and nation building and even today their pre-eminence is conspicuous in countries such as Romania, where the king is a public figure of highest moral integrity who saved the country from disaster in the Second World War, or in Bulgaria, where the monarch became one of the prime ministers after the fall of communism. In this timely book Ivor Porter charts the life of King Michael of Romania with great skill and in-depth understanding. Through eloquent personal accounts and historical records from the king’s personal archive he shows how very much the life of the sovereign was intertwined with the history of his country. The author knows Romania intimately, being well known for his activity as a British special operations executive operative in the country and later as a staff member of the Allied Control Commission in Bucharest.
The book is thus an important witness statement that throws new light on the onset of the Cold War in Romania and South-East Europe. The author shows that the communitisation of the country started with the direct Western approval, and also because of Allied’s unwarranted trust in the Soviet Union, coupled with hesitation at every step, mirroring in many aspects the behaviour toward Hitler before the war. Moscow did not display such niceties and went straight for the jugular in order to achieve its objectives. In Romania there was room for manoeuvre against the Soviet plans in 1945–46, but the opportunity to act was lost because of West’s procrastination. The Russians, unlike the Western Allies, expertly knew the problems of Romania and were able to exploit them in full, as shown by the restoration of Transylvania to Romania as a powerful bargaining argument securing the country’s cooperation.
King Michael of Romania and Queen Mother Helen – Diana Mandache collection
King Michael stands apart as a moral beacon in the middle of his country’s tragedies. Even in 1943 he made a public call for the country to extricate itself from the war, causing panic among the pro-German leadership. His greatest accomplishment was the coup of 23 August 1944, when with immense courage and vision he crucially instrumented the overthrow the pro-German dictatorship, with the effect that Romania immediately joined the Allies’ cause. The country thus avoided an imminent catastrophe, and according to western sources, the king’s action shortened the war by six months. That is a most remarkable achievement, even more so for a 23-year-old monarch, revealed by the fact that the army and administration followed their sovereign unwaveringly. That brought him and Romania the esteem of the Allies, well expressed in Churchill’s instruction to the British representatives in Bucharest: ‘stick to the boy’ (p. 130). The Soviets were conscious of his popularity among the people and even decorated the king with the Order of Victory, the highest Soviet honour given to only five foreigners, among them General Eisenhower. Uniquely in Cold War Europe, this resulted in three years of uneasy cohabitation between the king and a Soviet-imposed government led by the communists, with the Red Army present all over the country.
The Royalty Digest Quarterly will publish in its December issue (4/2010) an insightful interview with HRH Prince Nicholas of Romania, entitled "I see Romania as one big history lesson", in which he speaks about his country, education, his famous grandfather- HM King Michael, plans for the future. Interviewers: Diana Mandache & Valentin Mandac … Read More
Valentin Mandache, architectural historian 