Princess Maria Luisa, sister of Simeon of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, celebrated her 90th anniversary yesterday. The landmark date, January 13, was celebrated with a thanksgiving prayer at the Alexander Nevsky Memorial Temple in Sofia.
“A person should do good, but not interfere in politics” – this is her maxim, Princess Maria Luisa strictly follows. She remembers her father’s advice – work hard, help, be good people.
“The example of my father and my mother is so great that no matter what I do, I always see a little,” she says. The princess has worked for over 20 years for the Red Cross in the USA, where she has lived for a long time.
The sister of Tsar Simeon II, Maria Luisa Borisova of Saxe-Coburggotska, was born on January 13, 1933 in Sofia. The first-born daughter of Tsar Boris III and Tsarina Joanna was named after her late grandmother and first Bulgarian princess of the Third Kingdom, Maria Luisa. The little princess was baptized according to an Orthodox rite in the early 1930s by Sofia Metropolitan Stefan, later Exarch of the BOC.
Her godfather was the then parliamentary leader Alexander Malinov
She was 10 years old when her father died. The sudden death of the Tsar in August 1943 dealt a crushing blow to the family. After the September 8, 1946 referendum on declaring Bulgaria a republic on September 16 the new communist government forces Tsarina Joanna to leave Bulgaria with her children Maria Luisa, who is 13, and Simeon II, who is 9.
In 24 hours we prepared and left everything, says Maria Luisa in one of her rare interviews. They settled first in Alexandria with her parents – the Italian king in exile Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Helena. In Egypt, the brother and sister experience a shock – the royal children, taught by private teachers, go to an English school without knowing a word of English. We survived, thanks to my mother we became human, admits Maria Luisa.
In 1951, Joanna and her children moved to Madrid, where María Luisa was enrolled in the School of the Sisters of Charity.
In 1958, the princess moved to live in Canada
Maria Luisa has four children from two marriages. The first is with Karl Vladimir, Prince zu Leiningen, a descendant of Queen Victoria and Tsar Alexander II. The wedding took place on February 14, 1957 in Amorbach Odenwald Castle. It’s the groom son of Prince Karl von Leiningen and Russian Grand Duchess Maria Kirilovna Romanov. On February 20, 1957, a religious ritual was also held in a Russian Orthodox church in Cannes, France.
On the paternal side, Maria Luisa’s sons from her first marriage, Karl Boris, born in 1960, a marketing expert, and Hermann, vice-president of the Royal Bank, born in 1963, are direct heirs to the British Crown.
After divorcing her first husband, the princess was married in 1969 in Toronto to Bronisław Hrobok, son of Polish army colonel Pawel Hrobok and Maria Czernowska.
Maria Luisa and Mr. Hrobok have a daughter and a son – Alexandra Nadezhda, born in 1970 and Pavel Alastair Antoni, born in 1972. Alexandra is married to a Portuguese with the iconic name of Magellan, like the navigator. Pavel is an electrical engineer, lives in San Francisco.
Princess Maria Luisa has 11 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Maria Luisa currently lives with her family in the city of Madison, in the state of New Jersey in the United States.
After the changes in 1989, Maria Luisa is
the first member of the royal family to return to Bulgaria in 1991.
Since then, he has been coming to his homeland every year. Here, as well as in the USA, he is engaged in charity work, supporting homes for orphans, nursing homes, hospitals.
Simeon spent his whole life a mile for Bulgaria, he never stopped helping. When the time came, he was very happy to come here and I supported him with all my heart, says the princess.
She is convinced that if a person does good, it returns to his soul.
In 1999, the princess was elected a member of the Board of the American University in Blagoevgrad. She is an honorary doctor of the university.
An annual academic award with a necklace for university graduates has been established in her honor and in her name.
The princess was awarded the Grand Cross of the Royal Order “St. Alexander” and with the Grand Cross of the Saxe-Ernestine Dynastic Order.
Trauma: They desecrate the bones of Tsar Boris the Third, burying him three times
I have also asked the president – who dug up my father’s grave and did not leave him alone. A wall of silence. And my brother as prime minister did not understand what they did with our father’s body. Everyone has the right to go to the grave of their parents. That’s why when my mother died, I said: Do not bury her in Bulgaria!
These are Maria Luisa’s words about the biggest trauma in her life – the desecrated mortal remains of her father, Tsar Boris the Third.
The drama with the remains of the last Bulgarian king is truly shocking – he was buried in the Rila Monastery, reburied in Vrana, and finally only the glass with his heart was returned to the Rila Monastery. His dead body is twice insulted as in a theater of the absurd, unbearable to experience, let alone forgive.
The last Bulgarian tsar died suddenly on August 28, 1943. Nearly 400,000 people from all over Bulgaria flocked to worship his mortal remains in the “Alexander Nevsky” temple-monument until September 5.
During his lifetime, the king chose the Rila Monastery as his grave. After his sudden death, his body was embalmed and placed in a zinc coffin, and his heart was placed separately in a glass jar. All the way to the Rila Monastery on the funeral train procession, hundreds of people crowd on both sides of the tracks to catch a last glimpse of the king.
The monarch was sent off with military honors. In the church of the Rila monastery, the zinc coffin is placed in a special sarcophagus, and next to it is the glass with the royal heart.
A year later, the government in Bulgaria changes. The new communist rulers want Bulgaria to become a satellite of the Soviet Union, and the memory of the monarchy to be erased. Chief Georgi Dimitrov orders the royal tomb to be removed. On the eve of Easter 1946, the royal coffin was taken out. The action was personally led by Lev Glavinchev, a partisan and functionary of the new government, famous for his cruelty. Soldiers vandalize the marble tomb with hammers.
The widowed Queen Joanna is informed that her late husband will be buried in the park of the Crow Palace. She hastily built a small chapel where the mortal remains of Boris III were laid.
In 1950, the new leader of the country, Valko Chervenkov, ordered the chapel to be demolished. Whether the bones of the late Bulgarian king were thrown away or scattered by the explosion – no one can say.
After 1989, the sculptor Alexander Haitov, son of the writer Nikolay Haitov, started searching for the mortal remains. In 1991, they discovered the glass with the royal heart, but there is no trace of the remains of Boris III. In 1993, the glass with the king’s heart was taken to the Rila Monastery, where it was buried in his restored tomb in the church.
The years of communism are not in today’s textbooks, children do not know what it was like. And it is very important for people to know the past in order not to make mistakes in the future, says Princess Maria Luisa.
In 2018: Visited in Plovdiv at an exhibition about the rescue of the Jews
King Simeon, Queen Margarita and Princess Maria Louisa were special guests at the opening of the exhibition “Land of Saved Jews” in Plovdiv on May 30, 2018. The event was hosted by the regional governor of Plovdiv, Zdravko Dimitrov.
The exhibition, the work of the Israeli-Bulgarian Institute and the “Vreme” Film Studio, was dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews and presented some hitherto unknown facts. It contained reports, letters, telegrams and diaries of the highest German state apparatus, Gestapo agents and German diplomats from Sofia, Bucharest and Ankara.
The exhibition contained a letter from Adolf Hitler to Mussolini complaining about Tsar Boris III’s sympathy for the Jews, as well as correspondence between Tsar Boris and Angelo Roncalli regarding trains with Jews from Europe transiting through Bulgaria.
The head of the project Mrs. Silvia Avdala personally showed the exhibits to the royal family. All the evidence found proves the absolute role of Tsar Boris and the government in saving the Bulgarian Jews, said Mrs. Avdala.
Among the exhibits were the awards from American Jewish organizations, presented to Tsar Simeon, for the merits of his father Tsar Boris III in saving the Bulgarian Jews.
“The opening of the exhibition here is a special sign and a great recognition for Plovdiv. The city also participated very actively and actively in the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews, which, however, could not have happened without the cooperation of Tsar Boris”, said Dr. Neven Enchev on behalf of the Israeli-Bulgarian Committee.
Her grandmother Maria-Louise Bourbon of Parma leaves with a broken heart
Princess Maria Luisa of Italy was the first wife of Prince, later King Ferdinand, mother of King Boris III and grandmother of Simeon of Saxe-Coburg and his sister.
Maria Luisa was the daughter of Roberto Bourbon-Parma, Duke of Parma, godmother and favorite of the Pope. A representative of the Bourbon dynasty.
The Princess of Parma was only 12 when her mother died in childbirth. The girl grew up under the care of English governesses in Switzerland. He speaks five languages. He likes to sing and draw. A talented pianist. Her favorite poets are Dante and Leopardi.
Before the wedding of Maria Luisa with the Bulgarian prince Ferdinand there is a big obstacle – the religion of the future Bulgarian heir to the throne.
Maria Luisa is a devout Catholic. Her future husband is obliged to promise the Pope that the heir to the throne will be Catholic. The father-in-law, the Duke of Parma, demands the same. However, this contradicts the Bulgarian Constitution, which requires the heir to the throne to be of the Orthodox faith. However, after the intervention of Prime Minister Stefan Stambolov, the Bulgarian Parliament annulled the article in question from the Constitution.
So the couple got married in April 1893 in Pianore, near Pisa.
Prime Minister Stambolov and Bulgarian ministers arrive for the glamorous celebrations. The gift from the Bulgarian people, which Polixena Stambolova presents, is a tiara with Bourbon lilies, decorated with diamonds, rubies and emeralds in the colors of the Bulgarian flag.
Everyone is enthralled by the statuesque bride, dressed in folk motifs, paired with the dark red ribbon of the Order of Parma.
Fragile Maria Luisa is loved for her charm, kindness and charity. She is known for her charity. Plovdiv is her favorite city, it reminds her of the charm of her native Italy.
The princess stoically endures her husband’s flirtations and infidelities
The blow he could not bear, however, was the conversion of Crown Prince Boris from the Catholic to the Orthodox faith on February 2, 1896, a step the prince took to appease Russia. The Pope excommunicated him from the Catholic Church, his father-in-law, the Duke of Parma, broke up with him for life and deprived his Bulgarian grandchildren of their inheritance.
Shocked Princess Maria Luisa leaves the country with her second baby Cyril in protest against the baptism. He returns in a year. There’s no getting over the broken heart syndrome. Her death is considered a classic case of death from grief – she could not swallow the baptism of her first-born son Boris in the Orthodox faith. The 29-year-old descendant of the Bourbons died of pneumonia on January 30, 1899 – the day after the birth of her daughter Nadezhda.
According to others, the impetus for the disease was given by the frosty feast of the Epiphany, because of which, at the insistence of her husband, she stood for a long time in the square in front of the Palace.
Shortly before her death, a fortune teller predicted to her that she would die young, having given birth to two sons and two daughters. She died on January 30, 1899 of a common cold that her weakened immune system could not fight off.
She was buried in Plovdiv’s St. Ludwig Cathedral. The boulevard in front of the cathedral bears her name. Her sarcophagus is the work of the Italian sculptor Tommaso Gentile, and under it are written her last words to Ferdinand: “I am dying, but from heaven I will watch over you, over our children and over Bulgaria.”
Maria Luisa’s last words to her first-born son read: “When some day you will be called to reign, try to be an exemplary ruler.” Thus goes the Italian princess, who became the first princess of the Third Bulgarian Kingdom.
