Catherine Caradja - Early Years

Early Years

She was born in Bucharest, the daughter of Princess Irina Cantacuzino and Prince Radu Creţulescu. Caught in a financial struggle between her parents' families, she was abducted at the age of three by her father, who took her to England, and placed her in an orphanage under an assumed name. Her mother (who divorced her father, and remarried to Prince Nicolae Ghica) kept looking for her, but died in 1906. The princess was accidentally found in 1908 in a French convent by an aunt, who helped her escape, and brought her back to Romania, where the courts put her in custody of the Cantacuzino family. She was raised by her maternal grandmother and her maternal grandfather, Prince Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino, the Prime Minister of Romania at the turn of the 20th century.

The princess was educated in England, France, Romania, and Belgium, and spoke five languages. In 1914, just before the start of World War I, she married Prince Constantin Caradja (1892–1962), a member of the Caradja family. After German troops entered Romania in 1916 (see Romanian Campaign (World War I)), she flew from Bucharest with her two daughters, Irène Mathilde Catherine (born the year before) and Marie Constance Lucie (born ten days before). After taking refuge in Moldavia, she started working as a volunteer in a 30-bed hospital for typhus patients (she contracted the disease herself).

After the Armistice, Princess Caradja went back to Bucharest, and devoted herself to social work, most notably, at Saint Catherine's Crib, a complex of orphanages started by her mother, which housed more than 3,000 children. In 1920, she gave birth to a third daughter, Alexandra. The second daughter died in Vienna in 1933, while her eldest daughter and her husband (Constantin Emandi) were killed in the deadly earthquake of November 10, 1940.