Princess Ileana of Romania

Princess Ileana of Romania, also known as Mother Alexandra (5 January 1909 – 21 January 1991), was the youngest daughter of King Ferdinand I of Romania and his consort, Queen Marie. She was a great-granddaughter of Emperor Alexander II of Russia, Queen Maria II of Portugal, and Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. She was born as Her Royal Highness Princess Ileana of Romania, Princess of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.
Ileana was born in Bucharest on 5 January 1909, the youngest daughter of Queen Marie of Romania and King Ferdinand I of Romania. Ileana had four older siblings: Carol, Elisabeth – later Queen of Greece, Princess Maria – later Queen of Yugoslavia, and Nicholas; and a younger brother Mircea.
Her mother wrote in her memoirs:
Before her marriage, Ileana was the organizer and Chief of the Romanian Girl Guide Movement.
Later, Princess Ileana was involved in Guiding in Austria and served as president of the Austrian Girl Guides. From 1935 until Girl Guiding and Scouting were banned in 1938 after the Anschluss.
Ileana was the organizer of the Girl Reserves of the Red Cross, and of the first school of Social Work in Romania.
She was an avid sailor: she earned her navigator's papers, and she owned and sailed the "Isprava" for many years.
In 1919, Ileana and her sisters Elisabeta and Maria accompanied their mother to Paris at the Peace Conference. The sovereign hoped that during her stay there she could find suitable husbands for her two eldest daughters, especially Elisabeta, already aged twenty-five. After a few months in France, the Queen and her daughters decided to return to Romania in early 1920. On the way back, they made a brief stop in Switzerland, where they found the Greek royal family, who lived in exile since the deposition of King Constantine I during the Great War.
The king's eldest son, Crown Prince and future King George II of Greece asked for Elisabeta's hand in marriage. The Swiss visit also resulted in the engagement of Ileana's eldest brother Crown Prince Carol to Princess Helen of Greece. Both couples married a year later.
In 1922, Queen Marie successfully arranged the marriage of her next daughter Maria to the King of Yugoslavia.
From then on Marie's focus was on finding her last unmarried daughter a suitable partner. An engagement to the Crown Prince of Italy was reported, but denied by Marie, and rumors of a marriage to the Tsar of Bulgaria were debunked by its royal court. In 1930, Ileana was briefly engaged to Count Alexander of Hochberg. Queen Marie favored the match, being pleased by the English blood and wealth of Alexander's family. The engagement was broken, however, when Alexander's homosexuality came to light.
In Sinaia on 26 July 1931, Ileana married the Archduke Anton of Austria, Prince of Tuscany at Peles Castle, Sinaia. This marriage was encouraged by Ileana's brother, King Carol II, who was jealous of Ileana's popularity in Romania and wanted to get her out of the country. After the wedding, Carol claimed that the Romanian people would never tolerate a Habsburg living on Romanian soil, and on these grounds refused Ileana and Anton permission to live in Romania.
After her husband was conscripted into the Luftwaffe, Ileana established a hospital for wounded Romanian soldiers at their castle, Sonnburg, outside Vienna, Austria. She was assisted in this task by her friend Sheila Kaul. In 1944, she and the children moved back to Romania, where they lived at Bran Castle, near Brasov. Archduke Anton joined them but was placed under house arrest by the Red Army. Ileana established and worked in another hospital in Bran village, which she named "The Hospital of the Queen's Heart" in memory of her beloved mother, Queen Marie of Romania.
After Michael I of Romania abdicated, Ileana and her family were exiled from the newly Communist Romania. They escaped by train to the Russian sector of Vienna, at that time divided into three sectors. After that they settled in Switzerland, then moved to Argentina and in 1950, she and the children moved to the United States, where she bought a house in Newton, Massachusetts.
The years from 1950 to 1961 were spent lecturing against communism, working with the Romanian Orthodox Church in the United States, writing two books: I Live Again, a memoir of her last years in Romania, and Hospital of the Queen's Heart, describing the establishment and running of the hospital.
Ileana and Anton officially divorced on 29 May 1954. On 19 June 1954 in Newton, Massachusetts, she married Dr. Stefan Nikolas Issarescu. Her second marriage ended in divorce (without issue) in 1965.
In 1961, Ileana entered the Orthodox Monastery of Our Lady of All Protection/ Notre Dame de Toute Protection, in Bussy-en-Othe, France. On her tonsuring as a monastic, in 1967, Sister Ileana was given the name Mother Alexandra. She moved back to the United States and founded the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, the first English language Orthodox monastery in North America. She was the third female descendant of Queen Victoria to become a Mother Superior in a convent of her own foundation along with Princess Alice of Battenberg and Princess Elisabeth of Hesse. She served as abbess until her retirement in 1981, remaining at the monastery until her death.
She visited Romania again in 1990, at the age of 81, in the company of her daughter, Sandi.
On 3–5 January 1991, she suffered a broken hip in a fall on the evening before her eighty-second birthday, and while in hospital, suffered two major heart attacks. She died four days after the foundations had been laid for the expansion of the monastery. At the time of her death, Ileana was the last surviving child of King Ferdinand I of Romania and Queen Marie of Romania.
Princess Ileana's personal papers (including family correspondence and photographs) are preserved in the "Queen Marie of Romania Papers" collection in the library of Kent State University (Kent, Ohio, US), and also in the "Mother Alexandra Papers" collection in the Hoover Institution Archives (Stanford, California, US). In addition, Ileana's correspondence with the Romanian diplomat George I. Duca between 1924 and 1985 is preserved in the "George I. Duca Papers" collection in the Hoover Institution Archives (Stanford, California, US).
Ileana and Anton had six children; they were raised in the Catholic faith of her husband and of the country: