Audiences in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein

Both Grand Duke Henri and Hereditary Prince Alois, who acts as his father's regent, were busy with audiences today. While the Hereditary Prince received the Slovak foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Miroslav Lajčák, the Grand Duke welcomed Cemil Çiçek, speaker of the Turkish parliament, as well as members of the Association des Anciens députés, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary, at the palais. While Liechtenstein goes picture-less, visuals of the Grand Duke at his audiences can be found on the website of the cour, here and here.

Source: IKR, CGD

Busy Day **

While the Grand Ducal and the Hereditary Grand Ducal Couples welcomed the press for a garden party at the Château de Berg this morning, Grand Duke Jean was out and about on his own and attended the 65th anniversary of the L’Association des Anciens Combattants de la Guerre 1939-45, des Forces des Nations Unies et des Soldats de la Paix Luxembourgeois - in case you've never noticed, I love long French names of organisations - which he is the honorary president of. Visuals are located on the website of the cour.

This afternoon Hereditary Grand Duke Guillaume and Hereditary Grand Duchess visited the company Lavador, which is a part of Dussmann Service, in Bissen to tour their facilities. A picture is available at L'essentiel, another one at Business Club Luxemburg.

During the evening hours Grand Duke Henri visited Roodt-sur-Syre near Betzdorf to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Fischer and Panelux, two bakeries, where he also had a look at their facilities. Pictures of the event are located at Wort in French and Wort in German, a video at RTL.
Source: CGD

Party in the Garden *

Photo: RTL

This morning the Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess alongside the Hereditary Grand Duke and the Hereditary Grand Duchess met with the Luxembourgish press for a small garden party at the Château de Berg. There were drinks, there was food, there was a lot of small talk and not a special reason for the reception apart from that. More pictures are located at Wort in German, Wort in French, Wort in Portuguese and Wort in English as well as Tageblatt and RTL. The cour also has two visuals and RTL a video (starting at 26:10).

Source: Wort

"The Consul of Bordeaux"

Photo: Luxemburger Wort / Wort.lu

Last night, Grand Duke Henri and Grand Duchess Maria Teresa attended the Luxembourgish premiere of the film "The Consul of Bordeaux" at the Utopolis cinema in Kirchberg as part of a series of screenings of Portuguese films organised by the Embassy of Portugal to the Grand Duchy in collaboration with Camões I, a Portuguese Cultural Centre in Luxembourg. 

Source: "The Consul of Bordeaux" official trailer from Henri Seroka on Vimeo.

The film tells the story of a man who saved the lives of about 30,000 refugees during World War II in only a week by frantically granting them visas. Among those receiving visas were no other than Grand Duchess Charlotte, her husband Prince Felix and their children Hereditary Grand Duke Jean, Princess Elisabeth, Princess Marie-Adelaide, Princess Marie-Gabrielle, Prince Charles and Princess Alix as well as Grand Duchess Maria Ana.

The man is, of course, Aristides de Sousa Mendes who is sadly largely forgotten these days. He was Portugal's consul-general in Bordeaux, France. At the time of the French capitulation in June 1940, thousands of refugees made their way south in the direction of Spain and Portugal to escape from the Germans. To enter Spain, one needed a Portuguese transit visa as Spain had already prohibited refugees to enter their country. The Portuguese dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, then also decreed that under no circumstances Jews or dissidents were to be granted passage to Portugal.

At first Sousa Mendes only offered to grant visas to his friend, a Polish rabbi, and his family. The rabbi did not accept the offer stating that he could not leave when others were to be left behind. The Portuguese consul-general did not know what to do and after two days of thinking, on 17 June, Sousa Mendes decided to disobey the order given by his government and to issue visas for everyone, regardless of their nationality, race or religion. In the next few days, he granted about 30,000 visas to refugees, among them 12,000 Jews, the Grand Ducal Family of Luxembourg and 17 members of the Imperial Family of Austria.

On 20 June, Salazar ordered Sousa Mendes to come back to Portugal immediately. On his way, he granted more visas to refugees, before being stripped of his office three days later. Another day later, Salazar stated that none of Sousa Mendes' visas were valid anymore.

Sousa Mendes was later stripped of his title as diplomat and his pension was taken away. Furthermore, he was disallowed to practise law, his original occupation, and everyone in the country was forbidden to show him any charity. In 1954, he died in poverty and only in 1988 he was rehabilitated by the Portuguese parliament.

More pictures of the film premiere are located at Wort in Portuguese and on the website of Manuel Dias.

Source: Sousa Mendes Foundation, Yad Vashem, Wort

Luxarazzi 101: Countess Marie Kinsky of Wchinitz and Tettau

As it is a slow news day, it is a good day as any to have a look at one of the members of the Princely Family of Liechtenstein, the Princess herself. In today's part, we will have a look at the life and family of Princess Marie when she was still a countess. A second part to be published later on will deal with her life since her wedding in 1967.

Born on 14 April 1940 in Prague, Bohemia, Countess Marie Aglaë Kinsky of Wchinitz and Tettau is the fourth of seven children of the late Count Ferdinand Carl Kinsky Count of Wchinitz and his wife née Countess Henriette of Ledebur-Wicheln.

Princess Marie as a baby
(Photo: Liechtensteinisches Landesarchiv)

The Kinskys are one of the oldest and most illustrious noble families of Bohemia. Their family history dates back to 1237 when they were firstly mentioned. Legend has it that they are actually much older: When a beautiful king’s daughter went out hunting in the forest one day, she was attacked by a group of wolves. All of her attendants left the scene apart from a young man who fought off the wolves and thus saved the princess. To thank him, the young man was ennobled by the king.

The young Countess Marie spent the first five years of her life on the Bohemian properties of the family but at the end of the Second World War, her life changed radically. One Sunday afternoon, Czechs came to the family’s castle and told them that they had to leave immediately. Only given ten minutes to pack their belongings, they had to leave almost everything behind and were brought to a Koncentračni Tabor, a Czech concentration camp.

[In case you did not know... After the end of the war, the Czechoslovakian government had kept some of the formerly German concentration camps open to inter many Germans left in the country as well as Polish and Hungarian people who had to work as forced labourers. For the first year they were called concentration camps but under international pressure, the name was changed later on.]

Countess Marie's maternal grandfather, Count Eugen of Ledebur-Wicheln, died during their time in the concentration camp in November 1945. After a few months, the family was able to leave the concentration camp with the help of a French officer. They fled to the Bohemian Forest region where they were hidden by a family friend for a month until an American priest helped them to leave the country. Much like the Liechtensteins, the Kinskys were stripped of all their properties based on the Beneš decrees.

The Kinsky family
(Photo: Liechtensteinisches Landesarchiv)

After they made it safely to Germany, the family moved to Ering in southeastern Bavaria where they lived at the Eringer Schloss with the baronial family Sedlnitzky-Odrowaz of Choltitz. The sister of Countess Marie’s mother and a daughter of Baron Ivo Maximilian of Sedlnitzky were friends and the families had agreed during wartime that they would help each other out if one of them got into trouble.

Both of the Sedlnitzky family's sons were killed in action and the baron died in 1946 following a heart attack. Thus Countess Marie’s father, Count Ferdinand, took up the management of the family’s estates for the next few years. Marie and her siblings attended the local Volksschule (board school) in Ering. In 1949, she changed to the Heimschule Kloster Wald in Baden-Wuerttemberg, a Benedictine boarding school which, to his day, is very popular with the German nobility. The school had been paid for by relatives and friends of the family who still owned properties.

The Kinskys then moved to Munich in 1950 when the Sedlnitzky family had expanded due to their daughters' marriages. Count Ferdinand subsequently started to work for Count Karl-Theodor of Toerring-Jettenbach.

Countess Marie graduated from school in 1957 and then moved to Great Britain for a while to improve her English language skills. She later also lived in France to groove her French.

She planned on studying art history upon her return to Germany but her family did not have much money and thus could not afford to pay for long university studies. So instead she started to attend the Academy for Applied Arts at the University of Munich for six semesters and graduated with a diploma. Afterwards, she worked as a commercial graphic artists in Dachau near Munich until her engagement in 1965.

Marie and Hans-Adam in 1966
(Photo: Liechtensteiner Volksblatt)

The connection between the Kinsky and Liechtenstein families had already existed long before Countess Marie met her future husband, then Hereditary Prince Hans-Adam. Her mother's sister Countess Karoline of Ledebur-Wicheln had been married to Prince Johannes Franz of Liechtenstein, a cousin of the Prince Franz-Joseph II, Hans-Adam's father. In addition, Princess Gina's mother was a born Countess Kinsky of Wchinitz and Tettau as well as other relations dating further back.

In the summer of 1961, Countess Marie paid a visit to Liechtenstein's capital Vaduz to visit her aunt and uncle. While out and about with friends, she bumped into Princess Gina who invited them to come to the Schloss where the family lived as her sons were home on holiday and bored. Though Countess Marie and her friends weren't too thrilled at first because they thought that the princes were too young, they decided to visit anyway.

While Prince Hans-Adam II claims that it was love at first sight for him and that he knew from the minute that Countess Marie walked into the door that she would be his future wife, his chosen one wasn't so sure. Even though Countess Marie considered the Hereditary Prince to be nice and intelligent, she simply thought of him as a young boy. Born in 1945, Prince Hans-Adam is five years her junior.

Being famously stubborn, Hereditary Prince Hans-Adam did not give up though and tried to pursue Countess Marie who was in love with someone else at the time. Eventually, the prince's persistence paid off but now Marie's father wasn't too sure about the man who wanted to marry his daughter considering him to be too young. During a visit to Nizza where Countess Marie was staying with her brother at the time, Hereditary Prince Hans-Adam managed to convince his future brother-in-law, and through his advocacy also Countess Marie's father, that he would a good choice.

In January 1955, the Princely House announced the engagement of Hereditary Prince Hans-Adam, 20 at the time, and Countess Marie, 25. The wedding would take place about one and a half years later (though luckily you won't need to wait as long for the second part of this biography).

Business in Bahrain

Photo: Bahrain News Agency

Prince Philipp of Liechtenstein, chairman of the board of trustees of the LGT Group which is owned by the family, is currently visiting Bahrain where he met with Sheikh Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifa, the country's finance minister. Together they talked about aspects of corporation between Bahrain and Liechtenstein as well as possible investments by the LGT in the island country in the Persian Gulf.

Source: Bahrain News Agency

The Future of Healthcare *

Photo: Daniel Ospelt / Liechtensteiner Vaterland / Vaterland.li

On Monday, a health symposium took place in Triesen, Liechtenstein's third largest municipality in the south of the country. Hereditary Prince Alois attended the event, where they talked all kinds of health related stuff I do not wish to bore you with, as its patron. In case you are super-interested in Liechtenstein's healthcare system, head over to Vaterland and Volksblatt where there is more information as well as visuals, a video including an interview is available at 1 FL TV (starting at 2:49).

Source: Vaterland

Back in Brussels

Photo: Nicolas Maeterlinck / Belga

It seems Princess Margaretha is quite a commuter these days. She spent the beginning of the week in Luxembourg to cheer on the athletes at the Games of the Small States of Europe, on Thursday evening she paid a short visit to Belgium to accompany her aunt Queen Fabiola to a concert before travelling back to Luxembourg for yet another few cheerful hours at the Games. Last night, she was back in Brussels to attend the final session of the final concerts of the Concours Reine Elisabeth alongside aforementioned Queen Fabiola. 

The Concours musical international Reine-Élisabeth-de-Belgique, as it is full name, is an annual music competition taking place at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. It is a founding member of the World Federation of International Music Competitions and is considered to be one of the most prestigious and most difficult. This year's award in the category piano was won by Boris Giltburg from Israel.

A video is located at Belgian RTL, while pictures can be found at Belga.

Source: RTL

Closing Ceremony *

After a week full of sports and fun, the 15th Games of the Small States of Europe are officially over. Yesterday evening, the closing ceremony was held at the stunning Abbaye de Neumünster. Grand Duke Henri and Grand Duchess Maria Teresa as well as Hereditary Grand Duke Guillaume and Hereditary Grand Duchess Stéphanie were present for the final party.

Photo: RTL

Wort has a video of the closing ceremony including an interview with the Grand Duke. Pictures can be found at Sportrevue, Tageblatt and RTL.

For the first time in history, Luxembourg came in first place in the overall medal count winning 36 gold, 39 silver and 31 bronze medals. Liechtenstein took home 11 gold, 16 silver and eight bronze medals and thus finished fourth. 

The five days of competition brought as an array of Grand Ducal and, to a lesser extend, Princely sport fans avidly cheering for their country, or both as Princess Margaretha demonstrated. Apart from the princess of Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, who was often accompanied by her daughter Princess Marie-Astrid, Grand Duke Henri, Grand Duchess Maria Teresa, Grand Duke Jean, Hereditary Grand Duke Guillaume and Hereditary Grand Duchess Stéphanie were the most frequent guests at the Games. Also among the spectators were Prince Guillaume and his wife Princess Sibilla with their four children, Prince Paul-Louis, Prince Léopold, Princess Charlotte and Prince Jean-André as well as Archduchess Marie-Astrid, her oldest son Archduke Imre and his wife Archduchess Kathleen. Another representative from Liechtenstein was Princess Nora. 

[As always: Not sure who those mentioned above are? Our Who's Who will help you!]

In case you have missed the last week of sporting events, it is totally worth checking them out now. Relive Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four and Day Five right here on the blog.

Source: Wort, GSSE

Games of the Small States of Europe - Day Five **

Sigh... Sadly, it's over. The Games of the Small States of Europe who have kept quite a few members of the Grand Ducal Family of Luxembourg, the Princely Family of Liechtenstein and thus us busy over this past week have come to an end. But before it was indeed over, some family members tried to squeeze in another few sporting competition into their schedule. 

Photo: Sportrevue

While Grand Duchess Maria Teresa watched the women's basketball final, which was won by Luxembourg, today, Grand Duke Jean was accompanied by three of his children, namely Grand Duke Henri, Princess Marie-Astrid and Princess Margaretha, to view the last tennis matches of the Games. Meanwhile, Hereditary Grand Duke Guillaume and Hereditary Grand Duchess Stéphanie laos were at the beach volleyball finals. The Hereditary Grand Ducal Couple was joined by Grand Duchess Maria Teresa to watch the men's volleyball final. The Grand Duchess was also present for a flashmob where she danced along to the music.

In the end, Luxembourg was the most successful nation at the Games of the Small States of Europe and kept home about 36 gold, 39 silver and 31 bronze medals. Liechtenstein came in fourth and took home about 11 gold, 16 silver and 8 bronze medals. (I'm saying about because every medal table tells me a different outcome right now so I'm sticking with the one on the official website though there might be slight inaccuracies.)

Pictures of the sporting events today are located at L'essentiel, Tageblatt, Christian Kemp #1, Christian Kemp #2, Julien Garroy #1 and Julien Garroy #2, while visuals of the flashmob can be found at Wort in German, Wort in French and a video at Wort. A video of today's sporting events is available at RTL.