Less than a three-hour drive from Pordenone, into Slovenia, lies Lake Bled, a tranquil jewel north-west of Ljubljana. It was here that King Aleksandar I Karađorđević and his new bride Queen Maria chose to spend their honeymoon in 1922, at Schloss Seebach, soon to be purchased from the princes Windischgrätz and renamed Suvobor. The day following their wedding in Belgrade on 8 June, the couple took the train to Bled, when pioneering Slovenian photographer and filmmaker Veličan Bešter (1891-1938) captured their arrival. We first see panoramic vistas of the lake and Schloss Seebach (torn down in 1939 and replaced by Marshall Tito’s residence, Villa Bled), followed by the royal disembarkation.
Queen Maria (1900-1961), known to family and friends as Mignon, was the daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie of Romania. Her marriage was designed to cement the relationship between her country and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, aka Yugoslavia. In his diary, Henry “Chips” Channon confided (18.07.1938): “She adores her children, her comforts, her chocolates and her English nurses… and in time she came to love her husband, the late King Alexander, [who] looked like a distinguished dentist. He was in a way a great man, a martinet though kindly. He always pretended not to understand English and addressed his wife in French; she always answered in English, which is the last language of Yugoslavia…” Following the King’s assassination in Marseille in 1934, Maria spent more and more time in England, where she settled down with her British lady-in-waiting, Violet Rosemary Cresswell. Channon wrote, “I have never seen two people, of any sexual arrangement, so in love with one another.” (10.09.1940)

Jay Weissberg