Marriage and Children
Although it would eventually prove to be of no assistance to Italy, Giovanna duly married Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria in Assisi in October 1930, in a Roman Catholic ceremony, attended by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Bulgarians deemed her a good match, partly because of her mother's native Slavic ethnicity. At a second ceremony in Sofia, Bulgaria, Giovanna (who herself was daughter of a Roman Catholic father and a born Orthodox mother) was married in an Eastern Orthodox Church ceremony, bringing her into conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. Giovanna adopted the Bulgarian version of her name, Ioanna. Giovanna knew the Pope's Apostolic Visitor to Bulgaria, Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII who was able to help her. She and Boris had two children: Marie-Louise of Bulgaria, born in January 1933, and then the future Simeon II of Bulgaria in 1937.
In the years prior to World War II, Tsaritsa Ioanna became heavily involved in charities, including the financing of a children's hospital. During the war she counterbalanced her husband consigning Bulgaria to the Axis by obtaining transit visas to enable a number of Jews to escape to Argentina. Tsar Boris also proved less malleable than Hitler had hoped, and following a meeting in Berlin in August 1943, the Tsar became seriously ill and died, aged 49. While stress and a heart condition were the official reasons for his death, rumours that he had been poisoned by Hitler were voiced at the time and have since grown. Ioanna's son, Simeon, became the new Tsar and a regency was established led by his uncle Prince Kyril, who was considered more pliable by the Germans.
Read more about this topic: Giovanna Of Italy
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and/or children:
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.”
—F.H. (Francis Herbert)