Has the daughter of Emperor Nikolay II lived in Bulgaria?
(Continuation of previous issue)

Lalka’s wedding

The suite
According to contemporaries, most probably in the summer of 1922 one after the other several Russian emigrants settled in the village of Gabarevo. First came Petr Alexandrovich Alexeev, whose name was soon “Bulgarized” into Petar Alexiev. He took lodging with some old people. In the municipal register he is registered as “born on January 15, 1884, in Smolensk, Russia”. He said he was a doctor. After he cured several local patients, a committee of doctors checked his medical knowledge, recognized his qualifications and he was appointed as doctor of 14 villages with a seat in Gabarevo. About a month later arrived an exquisitely beautiful young lady in an elegant summer dress. In the municipality she was registered as Eleonora Albertova Kruger, 24, born in Petersburg. In the column of nationality “Russian” is corrected to “Polish”. Dr. Alexiev welcomed her as a close person – he addressed her as “Nora” and took her to live in the same house. Nora told Gabarevo women that she was a daughter of a Russian nobleman and Polish countess, but she never mentioned the names of her parents. Never! She also said she was married, her husband and child had perished and she saved herself escaping from Russia.

She had two distinctive features: her snuffling and the invariable silk scarf round her neck. A rumour spread that she was shot at while escaping and she was wounded. According to some, her vocal cords were damaged, according to others – she was wounded in the breast, while still others thought the scar on her cheek to be from a ricochet bullet. Nora never disclosed the truth. Two months after her arrived Mitrofan. He stayed with the doctor and Nora. He cooked for them, but he did not stay long, he left for some place never to come back. Perhaps around the same time three more white-emigrants arrived – Matvey, Yakov and Sergey, who settled in Gabarevo and even had their own families. At first sight they were little educated, common people. But upon careful observation Gabarevites noticed that they, like Nora and Dr. Alexiev, didn’t talk about their descent and past and concealed their identity. Maybe they had a special mission – be at the call (a kind of “suite”) of very important persons?

The cohabitation of Nora and Dr. Alexiev under one roof started to disturb the patriarchal morals in Gabarevo. So they got married on September 26, 1924. In the church book it is recorded that he was a 40-year-old bachelor and she a 25-year-old widow. Although they lived together, the whole village was convinced that their marriage was fictitious and unconsumed. Obviously the aristocratic Nora was his superior in descent, and he behaved towards her not like a man in love but with the owe and devotion of a bodyguard to his master. Perhaps that was exactly his role, to watch over her life and health, bearing in mind that she was sickly, may be gravely wounded and her tendency to somnambulist walks at night (interestingly, Princess Anastasia suffered from the same!). Therefore, not so much moral motives than the need for his constant presence beside her was the reason for this strange marriage.

Months after their wedding arrived the young Russian Georgiy Pavlovich Zhudin, whom they called Georges. He was tall and lean, suffering from tuberculosis. He died young on December 27, 1930. Neither he nor Nora advertised that they were brother and sister, but people noticed she was very fond of him. She planted two pine-trees at his grave and regularly went to water the flowers. After her death, probably at her instructions, she was buried on his right side, as is the Russian tradition for blood relations.

One more “new-comer” joined the odd emigrant’s group – Konstantin Pavlovich Zhudin. Judging by their names, he should be Georges’s brother, but no one in Gabarevo was left with this impression. What is more, on the back of a photograph of the four with other Russian emigrants before the Shipka Monastery, Nora wrote Zhilin for Georges and Zhilo for Konstantin. Didn’t she want to leave a trace that they were both under assumed names?

Several months later Konstantin Pavlovich left for Sofia and got a job at the French Embassy. Together with Nora he was a witness at the wedding of Lalka Valcheva from Gabarevo in Sofia on October 15, 1939.