How long will the truth be concealed?
After I made sure that at least until the early 1940s Nora maintained active social contacts, I was tortured by the question: If she was Anastasia, was it possible that she did not confide her secret with anyone? And I am becoming convinced that she did. Moreover, she desperately sought a way to hint it was high time to identify her, especially if she found out about the imposter Anna Anderson. But nobody read her gestures. In those years the truth would have been so dangerous and shocking that nobody would dare believe it and support it. Before many of her students she started “dropping” phrases full of suggestion: that she had lived in a royal palace, bathed in a golden tub, maids dressed her, brushed her hair and cut her nails. Here is how her painting of flowers of the field, presented by Nora to Stefanka Nestorova, was interpreted by people obsessed by her mystery: poppy – Maria, oats – Olga, gentian – Tatyana, scilla (“vasilyok”) – Tsarevich, chamomile (“romashka”) – the Romanovs. With this painting Sherlock Holmes would have perhaps identified Anastasia immediately. Unlike modern investigators who prefer to keep proud (or perhaps guilty) silence?!

One more thing, bearing in mind that traditionally Russian aristocracy officially spoke in French, it struck me as odd that it had a command of the German language “as a mother tongue”. For Anastasia, however, it would be understandable as the Tsarina Mother, Alexandra Fyodorovna was the German Princess Alix von Hessen-Darmstadt. The fact that no one remembers Nora teaching German may mean that she knew it well as a spoken language but not grammatically. What about her love for the dogs – Rex, Tangra, Beba, Jimmy, Johnny? Beautiful, pedigree, they accompanied her throughout her life. Is not the dog for her a symbol of her saved life, after on the boat a dog died of the bullet meant for her? Blagoy Emanuilov made an anagram of the name of the cocker spaniel Maron (Prince Alexey had the same dog!) that belonged to her and Georges and obtained Roman! Isn’t this a hint at their descent?

But the most probable clue was Vasilka Kerteva. Was she not Nora’s ambassador, a cry for help to her Motherland not to bury her, to remember her? Unfortunately, Nora’s closest friends – Lotte, Kerteva, Anka, Lalka are not living to give answers to many questions. For example, Nora’s stay in Berlin for almost a year is very strange. I find it hard to believe that a proud and worthy person like Nora would go in the role of “domestic” painter for some Bulgarian parvenu! Did not she go with the hope that the Germans had saved her mother and other members of her family and she could find them under their legalizing legends? By the way, the Italian newspaper Stampa launched the version that as a result of a Bolshevik-Monarchist plot the Emperor’s family was taken out of the country and lived scattered in exile in full secret. This could explain the superficially absurd attempts to make the bodies of the tsar’s family unfit for identification by spilling acid and burning them, even though all Russia knew about their execution. If all beads of coincidences are put in a string, maybe they can justify Nora’s depression in the last years of her life when she found out that actually no one in her country was interested in her and they would rather consider her dead. “To date the Russians wouldn’t admit that the bones of two of the children of Nikolay II have not been found and the Russian press continues to circulate the version that the two missing skeletons were found and burnt in a separate grave,” examining magistrate Emanuilov says.

As a journalist and public figure, I am also surprised that Russia showed no interest in the two exhumations in Gabarevo. Here is what Dr. Nyagolov said: “I wrote about it, repeatedly, to monarchic societies in Russia. Some of them did not answer at all, and those which bothered to answer advised us to abandon this issue or said they were not interested. This makes me think that perhaps they already know the truth about Alexey and Anastasia. But since now there is access to the secret archives I see no reason why the truth should be hidden, whatever it is!”

I don’t know how much difficulties and negative emotions this digging in the graves brought to the researchers. To me even digging in the memory brought me pain. Because from the perspective of my age I realized: Whether she was Princess Anastasia or the Polish Countess Eleonora, Madam Nora was a cruelly deprived woman. Extracted from her natural environment, banned far away from her motherland, forced to marry an unloved man, fallen a pray to drugs, she left this world embittered by human tactlessness, envy, ignorance and ungratefulness – lonely and unappreciated. Her fate is actually part of the drama of thousands of human beings, which became victims of the social clashes of the tumultuous twentieth century. And as I am writing for the diplomatic circles, I would like to call upon the people working on the diplomatic front, when they sit around a table for any kind of negotiations and take the pen, to think before they put their signature, because maybe thereby they trace the fates of thousands of people. Yet, the whole life of Nora in the little sub-Balkan village is a proof that a noble, erudite and generously gifted personality, even when history deprived her of any chance, would always find a way to leave a deep mark.

Yordanka Tropolova