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The western Pennsylvania landscape is quite spectacular.
When the train rounded the famous Horseshoe Curve the
engineer jumped on the intercom to explain the history
of the Curve to passengers. The story involved a lot of
WWII data as well as how many people died during
its construction. In the café car I sit near several Amish
people, an Amtrak engineer, a conductor and a man
with an old Bible set beside his coffee. This
small group is engaged in conversation. I jump in
at an appropriate time and offer my two cents. The
topic is Scripture. The man with the Bible is telling
stories about how American evangelical Christians
when they see him reading the Bible openly in
Europe always make a loud show of meeting
another believer. “Oh brother in Christ! Another
brother in Christ! Let me join you, brother! Can we
pray together?”
The loudness, of course, is a typically American thing.
The man with the Bible was complaining about the Church
of England, saying how far it has strayed from apostolic
tradition in the last 30
years. The Amish nod in agreement. At another table is the leader of
a Lancaster Amish community. He tells me his small group is traveling
to his son’s wedding in Indiana.
The Amish woman sitting near the leader is in a starched
black dress with a hundred-plus buttons and all kinds
of flaps that seem to mimic the religious habit of a monastic.
I immediately think of Mother
Alexandra — the last princess — while also going back in
time to the Catholic nuns of my childhood—before they
donned mini-skirts.
The train swivels and jerks and stops at another
small Pennsylvania town. “So what do you do?” the
leader asks. “I’m going to Pittsburgh
and then Ellwood City to do research on the last
princess of Romania.”
I give the group a Wikipedia-style synopsis of Princess
Ileana’s life:
“This great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and
relative of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia lived the royal
high life in Europe, playing with the Tsar’s son, Alexei,
on royal yachts but also helping her mother
Queen Marie attend to the dying and wounded during
WWI. She married the Archduke of Austria and had six children;
went into another marriage after that and was then told by
the Communists who invaded her country: Either leave or be
executed. She took her children first to Switzerland,
then to Argentina and then to the
United States to a suburb of Boston, Newton,
where — because of the beauty of the New England
countryside — she decided to raise her children.”
In Newton, she bought a house where she could
raise her children.
She had no cash but she pawned something her
mother, Queen Marie of Romania, had given her: the
crown jewels of the Russian Empress
that were given to Queen Marie and then gifted
to Ileana after the death of the Queen.
Ileana had the crown jewels with her when she
went through US Customs — they were wrapped in
one of her nightgowns. She was
able to stay in the United States because she
was helped by Senator John F. Kennedy, then a resident of
Boston’s Beacon Hill. She eventually became a U.S. citizen.
The western Pennsylvania countryside resembles
the hills of Transylvania — at least this is what the
princess remarked when she
saw the Pennsylvania countryside for the first time.
This was one of the reasons she decided the area was
suitable to build a monastery.
At last when we arrive in Pittsburgh,
I tell myself that Union Station is an architectural
wreck. Passengers alight from trains 1930s-style,
which means climbing down train steps rather than
transitioning onto a same-level platform.
The station is just one big room with bright
fluorescent lights and vending machines. Utilitarian
and ugly, it’s definitely not worthy of a city with
a magnificent skyline known the
world over as The Golden Triangle.
At Union Station, I said good-bye to my Amish friends and headed to
the arrival area lined with Ubers and taxis. Somewhere in the mix was
my ride to the monastery. Emmanuel, the young caretaker at
Transfiguration, was due to pick me up and drive me the 40 miles or
so to Ellwood City. On the phone Emmanuel described himself as tall
and lanky with a long dark ponytail. Suddenly a guy fitting that description seemed to jump out of the shadows.
“Over here,” he said, pointing to a small SUV parked on the far side of the ramp. Within minutes we were on the road to Ellwood.
Of Greek descent, Emmanuel told me that one of his close relatives
was a priest. He mentioned serving with him at Divine Liturgy as a
tonsured reader. He said he lived in an apartment near the monastery and was “well compensated” for his work.
During the ride it occurred to me that Emmanuel resembled Prince
Anton of Austria, the man biographers say Princess Ileana was more or less forced to marry by her elder brother, King Carol.
King Carol had a rather low opinion of the princess — he once called
her base and conniving — and he wanted her out of Romania. King
Carol himself had twice abdicated succession to the throne, once
when he went off to marry and live with his mistress, Elena Lupescu.
Later he announced he was giving up Elena — he did not keep this
promise — and through a series of Byzantine machinations he
eventually worked his way back to power.
While Ileana had always been close to her brother, once he was
back on the throne Carol took it for granted that she would support
him in his feud with his wife, Princess Helen. Ileana, however,
supported Helen (Sitta) rather than her brother’s mistress and that
did not sit well with the King, who immediately punished her by
removing her from the presidency of the Romanian Y.W.C.A. and the
Girl Scouts.
Yet things didn’t end there. Carol found a way to force Ileana out of
Romania.
Hannah Pakula writes in, The Last Romantic, A Biography of Queen Marie of Roumania:
“…Looking for a way to rid himself of this ‘aching thorn’ in his side
and remembering Anton of Austria, Carol decided to marry Ileana off.
He contacted Prince Friedrich, Head of the House of Hohenzollern-
Sigmaringen, and his wife and asked them to invite Ileana and Anton
to Umrich. ‘We found that there were many things we had in
common,’ Ileana recalled many years later. ‘We liked flying and we
got on very well. It was a sort of rebound thing….I never realized the
trap I was walking into, or else I might have thought twice about it.’”
Queen Marie’s concerns about the marriage had nothing to do with
Anton’s flawless pedigree. The pedigree was fine but there was a
fly in the ointment. It’s called ruined aristocracy.
“But Anton was a penniless exile, after the family fled Austria, he
had earned his living working in a gas station in Spain,” Pakula writes,
“Marie felt that of all her children, Ileana was best-suited to wear a
crown. A decent, kindly young man, more comfortable in workman’s
overalls than formal dress, Anton had had little time or opportunity
for an education. ‘So there are great lapses in his knowledge of art,
literature and…history,’ Marie said. ‘But he’s an expert engineer and
electrician, and a first rate pilot. Big, solid, trustworthy, he has not a penny except what he earns with his own hands.’”
Ileana and Anton’s wedding took place on July 26, 1931. It was a sad
affair with the princesses’ mother, Queen Marie in tears and the
princess herself sobbing as she knelt before the queen in a
ceremonial fashion after the nuptials. The princess, who loved
Romania, knew her marriage meant exile and separation from the
Romanian people.
“Follow that little bridge if you want to see Mother Alexandra’s
Mother’s grave,” Emmanuel said, indicating a small wooden bridge
near the entrance to Transfiguration.
I told myself I’d visit the grave the following day after getting
settled in at St. Bridget’s House, the small house where the princess
spent her last years. A number of guest houses, a chapel, the central
monastery area and nuns’ quarters lined the long road that cut
through the middle of Transfiguration. St. Bridget’s House was the
last building before the beginning of a dense wooded area.
Emmanuel gave me a quick tour of the house. My eyes went directly
to a small but substantial library in the living room where I would
discover several of the princess’s books (signed Ileana, 1956), not
Mother Alexandra.
Before Emmanuel departed, I reached into my pocket for a tip but he
reminded me that he was “well compensated.”
This was the princess’s last house, the house where she recuperated
after breaking her hip and where she had her office in the living
room. Old photos on the wall showed a large desk placed before the
picture window that looked out over fields, woods and mountainous
hills beyond. Pennsylvania as Transylvania! I imagined the princess
pacing back and forth gazing at the same landscape I was looking at.
In this room the princess no doubt pondered the wide scope of her
life. When as a child she had played and swam at the beach with
Alexei, son of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. In the famous photo of
Alexei and Ileana in which Ileana is clutching Alexei’s arm, her
girlish smile buried in a head of curls.
She comes across as a kind of Romanian Shirley Temple while
Alexei — his eyes slanted leftward — seems focused on someone or
something of a sinister nature happening behind the camera.
Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the
2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural
Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage
Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including
“Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner
Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is
“Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.”
He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her
World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.