Marie of Yugoslavia

Yugoslavian Royalty. Queen Marie was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of the United Kingdom. The daughter of King Ferdinand I of Romania and Princess Marie of Great Britain and Ireland, Queen Marija Karadjordjevic was educated at the Romanian royal palace. She spoke Romanian, English, French, German and Serbian. Her Majesty was occupied with science, physics and chemistry as well as being a painter and sculptor. On June 8, 1922 she married HM King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in Belgrade and the couple had three sons: Peter, Tomislav, and Andrej. Her husband King Alexander I was assassinated in 1934 in Marseilles and was succeeded by his eleven-year-old son Peter II, who became the last King of Yugoslavia. During World War II in 1941, she and her sons escaped the invasion of Nazi Forces, coming to England, where she lived a fairly simple life in England for the last 20 years of her life. She suffered with debilitating arthritis the rest of her life. During and after World War II she took part in many humanitarian organizations, such as the Red Cross. She performed much of this work using the alias Maria K. Djordjevic. On November 29, 1945 the Communist regime abolished the Yugoslavian monarchy. Her citizenship was revoked, and her property was confiscated by the Yugoslav Communist regime in 1947, but her family was "rehabilitated" in 2014. General Charles de Gaulle decorated her with the Great Cross of the Legion of Honour in 1959. Originally, she was buried at the Royal Burial Grounds near Windsor Castle, but in 2013, her remains were repatriated to Serbia and with a state funeral, re-interred with other members of her family in St. George's Church in Oplenac, where six generations of her husband's royal family are buried.