Playboy king gets new grave

last updated 8 January 2015

Bucharest, Romania

The body of a former Romanian king, the notorious playboy Carol II, came back to Romania this week to be buried. Carol eloped with a commoner right after World War I, when he was 24. His parents had that marriage annulled, and he came back to wed a Greek princess. But as soon as she produced his heir, Michael, Carol sent her away so he could live with a Jewish divorcée. Amid political turmoil, he fled the country in 1940—taking plenty of art and treasure with him—and died in 1953 in Portugal, deposed and unmourned by his former subjects. The reburial is “a positive step, a move generated by Romanians trying to recover their history,” historian Dennis Deletant told Reuters. “The man himself is largely regarded as bringing the monarchy into disrepute.”