Princess Christina’s Stolen Royal Tiara

Princess Christina, the youngest of King Carl XVI Gustaf’s sisters, arrived for the annual Nobel Prize banquet at Stockholm’s Town Hall on December 10, 2011. She wore a purple gown embroidered with colorful flowers for the occasion, as well as the sash and star of the Order of the Seraphim and her brother’s Royal Family Order.

For the dinner, Princess Christina was seated between two Nobel laureates: Jules A. Hoffmann, who won the Nobel Prize for physiology, and Christopher Sims, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics.

With her colorful dress, Christina wore jewels set with diamonds and pearls. Her tiara was a special one: the petite diamond and pearl sparkler that belonged to Queen Sofia of Sweden. The tiara was passed down through the family until it was inherited by Christina’s godmother, Elsa Cedergren. She gave the tiara to Christina, who began wearing it in the 1960s. She usually paired it with pearls, just as she did on this occasion: diamond earrings with black pearl drops, a three-stranded black and white pearl necklace with a round pendant, and a diamond and pearl cluster brooch.

But, sadly, this was one of the final public appearance for the nineteenth-century tiara. In the spring of 2012, the tiara was stolen from a safe in Princess Christina’s apartment in Stockholm. The young man who stole the tiara confessed to his crimes, but there was no way to recover the tiara he had taken. He told the police that he had thrown the tiara into the sea from a bridge behind Parliament House in Stockholm. Though divers attempted to search for the valuable royal jewel, it was never recovered.