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Sparkling Royal Jewels From Around the World

Jewel History: Gem of Queen Olga’s Held Here for Duty (1921)

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Queen Olga of Greece, ca. 1880 [1]
“Gem of Queen Olga’s Held Here for Duty”
(originally appeared in the New York Times on 6 May 1921)



Queen Olga [2], mother of King Constantine of Greece [3], is in such circumstances that she is reported to have offered some of her jewels for sale. It has just become known here that she recently sent a young Greek officer to the United States with a large emerald brooch with instructions to dispose of it at the highest price.

The young man was dressed in civilian clothes and served as a mate on the steamer, which was the King Alexander. Upon arriving in New York he failed to declare the jewel, and he was arrested and imprisoned for twenty days. He was also fined $700, which was the foreign value put upon the brooch by the customs authorities. The captain of the vessel also was penalized for failing properly to acquaint passengers with American customs requirements.

The brooch, which had been in the family of the Greek Dowager for a century [4], was confiscated at the New York Custom House and, according to Paris stories, Queen Olga is now trying to find some means of retrieving it. Anti-royalists in Greece assert that the whole Greek royal family, comprising the King and Queen, seven Princes and about thirty Princesses [5], are feeling the effect of the economic distress in Greece.

Several weeks ago officials of the United States Customs Service in New York seized a lavalliere [6], with an emerald-studded pendant brooch, which they found in the possession of an electrician on board the steamship King Alexander. The jewel was appraised as having a value of more than $1,000, and it is still in possession of the government. The customs officers have disclaimed any knowledge of the history of the jewel or identity of its owner. The seizure was made on a charge of attempted smuggling.

NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Photograph available via Wikimedia Commons; source here.
2. Olga Constantinovna of Russia (1851-1926) was queen of Greece from 1867 to 1913 following her marriage to King George I. She was born a Russian grand duchess, the daughter of Grand Duke Constantine Nikolayevich and the niece of Tsar Alexander II. She was the mother of one Greek king and the grandmother of three more; she’s also the grandmother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
3. King Constantine I of Greece (1868-1923) reigned twice as the Greek monarch, first from 1913-17 and then again from 1920-22. Both of his reigns were marked by significant periods of upheaval in Greece; he abdicated twice.
4. Today, the former king and queen of Greece still possess a parure of emerald jewelry, inherited from Olga via her son, King Constantine I. The emeralds in those pieces also came from Olga’s Romanov ancestors. It’s unclear whether the piece described here included stones from the same cache of emeralds. Olga wears some of her emerald jewels in the photograph at the top of this post.
5. When this story was published, the Greek royal family included the following members: King Constantine I, Queen Sophie, Queen Olga, Crown Prince George, Crown Princess Elisabeth, Princess Alexander (Aspasia Manos), Princess Alexandra, Crown Princess Helen of Romania, Prince Paul, Princess Irene, Princess Katherine, Prince George, Princess George (Marie Bonaparte), Prince Peter, Princess Eugenie, Prince Nicholas, Princess Nicholas (Elena Vladimirovna), Princess Olga, Princess Elizabeth, Princess Marina, Grand Duchess Maria Georgievna of Russia (Princess Marie), Prince Andrew, Princess Andrew (Alice of Battenberg), Princess Margarita, Princess Theodora, Princess Cecilie, Princess Sophie, Prince Christopher, and Princess Christopher (Nancy Leeds). The royal family would gain an additional member — Prince Philip, today the Duke of Edinburgh — in a few weeks. The tally in the paper seems to be a bit off where princesses are concerned.
6. A “lavalliere” is another term for a jeweled pendant, often worn suspended from a chain.

Victoria Melita’s Emerald Wedding Tiara

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Victoria Melita wears the emerald tiara on her wedding day in 1894 [1]
So far, we’ve seen diamonds and sapphires from the collection of Princess Victoria Melita, who was at various times during her life a princess of Edinburgh and of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a grand duchess of Hesse, and a grand duchess of Russia. Today, we’re going to shine the spotlight on the emerald tiara she wore on her first wedding day.
Victoria Melita [3]

The diamond and emerald tiara was a wedding gift to Ducky, either from both of her parents (the Duke and Duchess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who were a British prince and a Russian grand duchess) or from just her mother. She wore the tiara on the day she married her first cousin, Grand Duke Ernst of Hesse, in 1894. The match was heavily promoted by their families, and even though they didn’t dislike each other, some sources suggest that Victoria Melita was actually already smitten with her second husband (and cousin), Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich of Russia, before she married Ernie. Let’s just say that there were warning signs that this royal marriage wasn’t going to work out from the start.

Regardless, the couple went through with the ceremony, much to the delight of their mutual grandmother, Queen Victoria. The bride’s aunt Vicky (who was then the Empress Frederick of Germany) noted that Victoria Melita wore “a light slender diadem of emeralds with a sprig of orange blossom stuck in behind” as a bride, pairing the emerald tiara with a veil owned by the groom’s late mother, Princess Alice [2]. (You can see her wedding jewels in the photograph at the top of this post.) The emerald tiara is similar in design to an aquamarine diadem that belonged to Ernst’s sister, Grand Duchess Ella; however, the two are distinct pieces.

The emerald tiara was part of a suite of emerald jewels given to her by her parents on the occasion. She also received a “necklace of pearls and emeralds” (which seems to be the necklace she wears in the photograph on the left above) and a “bracelet set with a large emerald” on the day [4]. Although her marriage was not a success (for all sorts of complicated reasons), she continued to wear her wedding emeralds even after her divorce from Ernst was finalized in 1901.

The tiara, along with many of the other jewels owned by Ducky’s mother and sisters, was displayed in Coburg in 1903 as a part of a charity exhibition of the family’s possessions [5]. And she was also photographed in the tiara with her second husband, Grand Duke Kirill, which means that it was still in her possession in 1905. After that, it falls off the map. In her write-up on the emeralds, Ursula speculates Ducky had the tiara broken up sometime after her second marriage, using the stones to create a larger emerald parure. Ultimately, very few of Ducky’s jewels are still around today, largely because the family had to sell many of their most valuable possessions after the Russian revolution. I think it’s safe to say that her emerald wedding tiara has also left the family’s collection, one way or another.

NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Cropped and edited version of the Hesse wedding photo, which is now in the public domain; you can see a full version of the photograph here.
2. Vicky’s comment, made in a letter to one of her daughters, is quoted at Ursula’s site.
3. Cropped version of an image in the public domain; source here.
4. Lists of Ducky’s wedding gifts from the Illustrated London News and the Graphic are excerpted here.
5. Ursula has a feature on the 1903 Coburg exhibition; you can see the emerald tiara here.

Victoria Melita’s Sapphires

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Victoria Melita of Edinburgh as Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna, ca. 1909 [1]

Another week, another look into Ducky’s jewel vaults! Today, we’re gazing upon one of the suites of jewelry that she inherited from her mother, Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia, Duchess of Edinburgh (and later Duchess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha): her imperial sapphire parure.

The sapphire and diamond set was a present to Maria Alexandrovna on her wedding in 1874. Her groom was Prince Alfred, the second son of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. The pair married at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, surrounded by her Romanov relatives. Along with a ruby tiara and a diamond fringe, Tsar Alexander II gave his daughter a parure of diamonds and sapphires. The set included the tiara, a necklace, and a stomacher that could be broken into two brooches.

Victoria Melita [2]

The sapphires were designed with Maria’s future role in mind. The blue gems were set in diamond elements that included floral motifs symbolizing her new home: roses (for England), thistles (for Scotland), and shamrocks (for Ireland). In her write-up on the jewels, Ursula states that the sapphires had an even longer royal history than the set itself; they were inherited by the tsar from his mother, Alexandra Feodorovna (who was born Princess Charlotte of Prussia).

The parure was passed from Maria Alexandrovna to her second daughter, Victoria Melita. As we’ve discussed before, Ducky was unlucky in love; her first marriage to Ernst of Hesse was a bust, and her second wedding, to her cousin, Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, was controversial. But she managed to hold on to the sapphires through both weddings. She was photographed in the complete parure in 1909, after she became Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna of Russia, but before she and the rest of the surviving Romanovs were forced to flee the country. In her biographical sketch of Ducky, Meriel Buchanan [3] describes the grand duchess wearing the sapphires during the Blessing of the Waters of the Neva ceremony in 1911: “the Grand Duchess Cyril looked magnificent, her train of cornflower-blue velvet lined with silver, a tiara of sapphires and diamonds blazing on her head, her blue eyes alight with happiness” [4].

Sadly, like so many jewels with Romanov connections, the whereabouts of this sapphire sparkler today are unknown. We know what happened to the necklace and the stomacher; Ducky sold them to Cartier in Paris after the Russian Revolution. (The sale probably happened around the same time she sold her Greek key kokoshnik to the Romanian royal family.) As for the tiara, who knows? I have a feeling it most likely met the same fate as Ducky’s other jewels. Times were tough for deposed royals, and nearly all of the surviving Romanovs sold off their gems to finance their post-imperial lives. I think it’s a safe bet that this piece was sold and likely broken up, joining so many other Russian tiaras in the mists of history [5].

NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Cropped version of an image in the public domain; source here.
2. Cropped version of an image in the public domain; source here.
3. Muriel was the daughter of Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador to Russia.
4. You can read the full biography here.
5. A version of this post originally appeared at A Tiara a Day in November 2013.