St. Petersburg celebrates its first royal wedding in more than a century

With a ceremony in which there were no prominent guests of European royalty, the Russian imperial house has once again celebrated a wedding ceremony in its country more than a century later. Grand Duke Georgi Mikhailovich Románov (40 years old), Jorge Románov, as he is known after being born in Madrid in exile, and Victoria Románova (39), called Rebecca Bettarini before her conversion to the Orthodox faith, celebrated their wedding ceremony this Friday in Saint Isaac's Cathedral in Saint Petersburg before more than a thousand people.

At the weddings of the ancient tsars, veritable crowds would gather to see them. On this occasion, there was no such mobilization of the people and the event has been more tinged with symbolic content for the family than political. The couple, who already married on September 24 in the Moscow civil registry, could not wear the emperors' jewels, which remain safely in the Kremlin, nor enjoy three very significant palaces for the Romanov house: the Winter, Peterhof and Catherine.

The bride, dressed in a long white dress by the designer Reem Acra, was embroidered with the double-headed eagle, recovered by the national symbology after the fall of the Soviet Union. On her head, the main ornament was a crown from the French house Chaumet, the Lacis tiara, a piece of high jewelry in which two large diamonds stood out set in a white gold network and 438 diamonds in total.

Among those present were George Romanov's godfather and the last king of Bulgaria, Simeon II, and his wife Margarita, as well as another pretender to a throne that ceased to exist many years ago, that of France. Luis Alfonso de Borbón attended the event accompanied by his wife Margarita Vargas, who also wore Chaumet jewelry.

“Who is Jorge Romanov?”, the Slavic press wondered before the illustrious wedding in Saint Petersburg. The answer is that the groom's mother, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna Románova (67 years old), was proclaimed head of the Russian imperial house by her father in 1989 when the last direct descendant of Tsar Alexander III died. The Russian Revolution had been destructive for the line of succession of the penultimate emperor. His last two living sons, Tsar Nicholas II and Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich, were shot in 1918, and in 1989 his last direct relative born out of morganatic marriages, Prince Vasily Alexandrovich, grandson of Alexander III on the part of mother. It was then that George Romanov's grandfather, belonging to the line of the third of the sons of the third to last tsar, Alexander II, proclaimed the Grand Duchess Maria Romanov heir.

However, George Romanov's wedding to a commoner has sparked criticism among Russian royalists. Under the succession laws established by Paul I, women can only inherit the throne if there are no descendants in the male line, so the grand duke could theoretically be emperor. However, this marriage is a morganatic marriage, and this prohibits the grand duke from his right to the throne. His mother, for example, did take care of this important detail for his lineage when she married another nobleman.

For the Russian government, it's yet another wedding of citizens. “The Kremlin has no opinion on this matter. There are many weddings in Moscow and in St. Petersburg every day. We always wish the newlyweds happiness," Vladimir Putin's spokesman told the Tass agency the day before. However, among the most notable Russian attendees were two people who have had some relevance in the ideology of power: the philosopher Aleksandr Dugin and the businessman Konstantin Maloféyev, owner of the ultra-conservative television channel Tsargrad and one of the main voices in the towers. of the Kremlin to reclaim Russian imperial glory.

How to Do a Liver Flush At Home http://bit.ly/gTUOoA

— Morgan Navedo Fri Jan 07 21:09:29 +0000 2011

In any case, this branch of the Romanovs does not bother the Russian government. “Our primary responsibility is to preserve the continuity of history. We are ready to respond to the request of the Russian people if they want to restore the monarchy, but we ourselves do not fight for power and do not claim anything - neither political rights nor property. Our duty is to maintain a living connection between modern Russia and its thousand-year history,” Jorge Romanov previously stated in a Tsargrad interview.

His wife, Rebecca Bettarini, is a crime novelist and daughter of Italian ambassador Roberto Bettarini. In order to celebrate the wedding, he converted to Orthodox Christianity in 2020. On his part, George Romanov also belongs to the Hohenzollern dynasty on his father's side, Prince Francis William of Prussia.

The wedding was officiated by Varsofoni, head of the Orthodox Diocese of St. Petersburg and Ladoga. Of the thousand people present, some 300, the most select guests, were entertained the day before with a dinner at the Vladimir Palace, the last imperial palace built in Saint Petersburg. According to the Petersburg newspaper Fontanka, Italian wines from the Fardella della Ripa and Brugnano wineries were served in honor of the bride; and for dessert, cakes by master pastry chef Michael Lewis-Anderson, trusted confectioner of Queen Elizabeth II of England herself, and other delicacies from the service of Yevgeny Prigozin, the so-called “Putin chef”.

The bride's ring was given by the Grand Duchess to George Romanov when he turned 18 so that he could give it to his beloved in the future. It consists of a ruby, which symbolizes love, escorted by two diamonds on the sides that represent purity and strength. During the wedding, the couple scrupulously complied with the Orthodox rites: as in any other marriage, two golden crowns symbolizing God's blessing were raised on their heads, they each held a lit white candle, and took three sips from the glass of wine .

The wedding took place in Saint Isaac's Cathedral, one of Russia's neoclassical jewels, which was built in the 19th century on land where there were two modest churches before. In the original, made of wood, Catherine I and Peter the Great, founder of St. Petersburg, were married. By the way, the new cathedral had the collaboration of the Spanish Agustín de Betancourt, an engineer and soldier of the Románovs who with his architectural works left his mark throughout Russia.

The wedding continued in the afternoon at the Ethnographic Museum of St. Petersburg with only a third of the guests. The facility closed its doors hours before to visitors and guests were able to participate in a photo session to remember. In addition, the bride and groom gave their dresses to the neighboring Russian Museum, which has a vast collection of up to half a million pieces from all corners of the odná shestaya, the sixth part of the world, as the tsars called their gigantic empire.