It’s impossible to overestimate the role Queen Marie of Romania (1875-1938) played in the public’s vision of the Balkans. Like her predecessor Queen Elisabeth, she was a writer and active promoter of Romanian culture, but unlike Elisabeth she was self-aware, combining a penchant for theatricality with an extraordinarily perspicacious understanding of the people and events around her. Daughter of Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh (Queen Victoria’s fourth child) and the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna (Tsar Alexander II’s fifth child), she married Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania (1865-1927) in 1893 when she was 17; it was not a love match. Marie likely wanted a suitable stage for her (and her mother’s) ambitions, and the shy Ferdinand was happy to let her be the glamorous face of the country. As Princess Marthe Bibesco wrote (Saturday Evening Post, 27.08.1927), “To be the husband of the queen is a sufficiently difficult role to play even if one is the king. He occupied this position for thirty-five years, and he was grateful to the end to her who left him all the shadow because she was all light.”
Marie understood like no one else her role as representative of an unfamiliar country and she played with the image to perfection, posing for photographs in Byzantine-inspired settings and gowns, surrounded by exotic lilies – it’s no surprise she was friends with Loïe Fuller. When World War I ended she went to Paris to lobby for her nation, with the result that Romania practically doubled in size when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Hers was a difficult shadow to live under: two daughters were unhappy queens, another became a nun, and her son King Carol II scandalized Europe on multiple occasions. Her memoirs however are a surprisingly insightful, beautifully written record of an extraordinary life.
Ferdinand became king in 1914, shortly after Romania entered World War I, so the coronation was delayed for some years until the country could afford a worthy spectacle. The footage we’re screening shows the order of events partly in reverse, starting 16 October 1922, the day after the coronation, when the royal couple were back in Bucharest and ceremonies included a procession through the newly erected Triumphal Arch (still only wood and plaster). It then cuts to the day before in Alba Iulia, at the just completed cathedral when the King and Queen presented themselves in their regalia – he in robes of royal purple with a crown made from the steel of Turkish cannons captured at Plevna, and she in red-gold, wearing a crown she helped design made of gold mined in Transylvania, one of the territories she won for Romania at Versailles. She confided in her diary, “I think it must have been a fine sight, and I hope that His Majesty and I played our part well and looked as well as we could in our somewhat overwhelming get-up.”

Jay Weissberg