Ileana of Romania

Princess, Exile and Mother Superior

Thom Nickels

• Publisher: Fonthill Media
• Year: 2026
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781036156442
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Princess Ileana of Romania (1909–1991), known later in life as Mother Alexandra, was the youngest daughter of King Ferdinand I of Romania and his consort, Queen Marie. Kind, intelligent, and beautiful, she was exalted among the royal courts of Europe and the darling of the Romanian people. She married Archduke Anton of Austria in 1931 and made Schloss Sonnberg her home before returning to Romania during World War II, where she converted the famous Bran Castle into a hospital for wounded soldiers. Exiled after the Soviet occupation of 1944, she eventually settled near Boston, Massachusetts, where Senator John F. Kennedy helped her on the path to citizenship.

Having pawned the magnificent Vladimir Sapphire Kokoshnik crown, once the possession of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia, to buy a home and raise her six children in relative security, life could have taken a predictable course from then on—but not so for the princess. In 1961 she travelled to France to train as a monastic, and six years later founded a monastery in Ellwood, Pennsylvania. During the quiet decades that followed, she gradually revealed to intimate friends the startling secrets her mother had told her about the murder of her relatives, the Romanov family, by the Bolsheviks on July 16, 1918.

Ileana of Romania: Princess, Exile and Mother Superior is both a narrative of an extraordinary life and an unveiling of new evidence pertaining to one of the great mysteries of the twentieth century. It is a story of war and struggle, the complete upending of an old order, and of finding peace at the end of it.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction: Monasticism and Royalty
• 1 The Last Romanian Princess
• 2 Meeting the Nuns
• 3 A Place of Retreat
• 4 The Mother Elizabeth Connection
• 5 Dating Services and Tainted Love
• 6 Driving Ileana
• 7 Survival of the Tsar and his Family
• 8 A Rendezvous? Tsar Nicholas II and Queen Marie
• 9 Interview with (Prince) Dominic Habsburg
• 10 Romania Today
• Appendix I: Alexei Lives: The Harry Binkow Files
• Appendix II: An Interview with Alexei Romanov in 1966
• Appendix III: Robert Speller: “Czarevitch in U.S.”
• Appendix IV: Skulls from the “Ekaterinburg Remains”
• Appendix V: From the Russian Imperial Historical Society
• Appendix VI: The Bacha List
• Appendix VII: Bullet Biography
• Afterword: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Communism
• Bibliography
• Plates