I’m on Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian traveling from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh to check out the legacy of the last Romanian Princess. 

Arranging this trip was almost as difficult as planning a trip to Romania. Figuring out how to get to Ellwood City, Pennsylvania from Pittsburgh was a challenge. Ellwood City is where Princess Ileana of Romania — in her later incarnation as Mother Alexandra — founded the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration. 

The western Pennsylvania landscape is quite spectacular. When the train rounded the famous Horseshoe Curve the engineer jumped on the intercom to explain the history of the Curve to passengers. The story involved a lot of WWII data as well as how many people died during its construction. 

In the café car I sit near several Amish people, an Amtrak engineer, a conductor and a man with an old Bible set beside his coffee. This small group is engaged in conversation. I jump in at an appropriate time and offer my two cents. The topic is Scripture. The man with the Bible is telling stories about how American evangelical Christians when they see him reading the Bible openly in Europe always make a loud show of meeting another believer.

“Oh brother in Christ! Another brother in Christ! Let me join you, brother! Can we pray together?”

The loudness, of course, is a typically American thing. 

The man with the Bible was complaining about the Church of England, saying how far it has strayed from apostolic tradition in the last 30 years. The Amish nod in agreement. At another table is the leader of a Lancaster Amish community. He tells me his small group is traveling to his son’s wedding in Indiana. 

The Amish woman sitting near the leader is in a starched black dress with a hundred-plus buttons and all kinds of flaps that seem to mimic the religious habit of a monastic. I immediately think of Mother Alexandra — the last princess — while also going back in time to the Catholic nuns of my childhood—before they donned mini-skirts.  

The train swivels and jerks and stops at another small Pennsylvania town. “So what do you do?” the leader asks. “I’m going to Pittsburgh and then Ellwood City to do research on the last princess of Romania.”

I give the group a Wikipedia-style synopsis of Princess Ileana’s life:

“This great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and relative of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia lived the royal high life in Europe, playing with the Tsar’s son, Alexei, on royal yachts but also helping her mother Queen Marie attend to the dying and wounded during WWI. She married the Archduke of Austria and had six children; went into another marriage after that and was then told by the Communists who invaded her country: Either leave or be executed. She took her children first to Switzerland, then to Argentina and then to the United States to a suburb of Boston, Newton, where — because of the beauty of the New England countryside — she decided to raise her children.” 

In Newton, she bought a house where she could raise her children.  She had no cash but she pawned something her mother, Queen Marie of Romania, had given her: the crown jewels of the Russian Empress that were given to Queen Marie and then gifted to Ileana after the death of the Queen. 

Ileana had the crown jewels with her when she went through US Customs — they were wrapped in one of her nightgowns. She was able to stay in the United States because she was helped by Senator John F. Kennedy, then a resident of Boston’s Beacon Hill. She eventually became a U.S. citizen.

The western Pennsylvania countryside resembles the hills of Transylvania — at least this is what the princess remarked when she saw the Pennsylvania countryside for the first time. This was one of the reasons she decided the area was suitable to build a monastery.

At last when we arrive in Pittsburgh, I tell myself that Union Station is an architectural wreck. Passengers alight from trains 1930s-style, which means climbing down train steps rather than transitioning onto a same-level platform. The station is just one big room with bright fluorescent lights and vending machines. Utilitarian and ugly, it’s definitely not worthy of a city with a magnificent skyline known the world over as The Golden Triangle.  

At Union Station, I said good-bye to my Amish friends and headed to the arrival area lined with Ubers and taxis. Somewhere in the mix was my ride to the monastery. Emmanuel, the young caretaker at Transfiguration, was due to pick me up and drive me the 40 miles or so to Ellwood City. On the phone Emmanuel described himself as tall and lanky with a long dark ponytail. Suddenly a guy fitting that description seemed to jump out of the shadows. 

“Over here,” he said, pointing to a small SUV parked on the far side of the ramp. Within minutes we were on the road to Ellwood.

Of Greek descent, Emmanuel told me that one of his close relatives was a priest. He mentioned serving with him at Divine Liturgy as a tonsured reader. He said he lived in an apartment near the monastery and was “well compensated” for his work.

During the ride it occurred to me that Emmanuel resembled Prince Anton of Austria, the man biographers say Princess Ileana was more or less forced to marry by her elder brother, King Carol. 

King Carol had a rather low opinion of the princess — he once called her base and conniving — and he wanted her out of Romania. King Carol himself had twice abdicated succession to the throne, once when he went off to marry and live with his mistress, Elena Lupescu. Later he announced he was giving up Elena — he did not keep this promise — and through a series of Byzantine machinations he eventually worked his way back to power.

While Ileana had always been close to her brother, once he was back on the throne Carol took it for granted that she would support him in his feud with his wife, Princess Helen. Ileana, however, supported Helen (Sitta) rather than her brother’s mistress and that did not sit well with the King, who immediately punished her by removing her from the presidency of the Romanian Y.W.C.A. and the Girl Scouts. 

Yet things didn’t end there. Carol found a way to force Ileana out of Romania. 

 Hannah Pakula writes in, The Last Romantic, A Biography of Queen Marie of Roumania:

“…Looking for a way to rid himself of this ‘aching thorn’ in his side and remembering Anton of Austria, Carol decided to marry Ileana off. He contacted Prince Friedrich, Head of the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, and his wife and asked them to invite Ileana and Anton to Umrich. ‘We found that there were many things we had in common,’ Ileana recalled many years later. ‘We liked flying and we got on very well. It was a sort of rebound thing….I never realized the trap I was walking into, or else I might have thought twice about it.’”

Queen Marie’s concerns about the marriage had nothing to do with  Anton’s flawless pedigree. The pedigree was fine but there was a fly in the ointment. It’s called ruined aristocracy.  

“But Anton was a penniless exile, after the family fled Austria, he had earned his living working in a gas station in Spain,” Pakula writes, “Marie felt that of all her children, Ileana was best-suited to wear a crown. A decent, kindly young man, more comfortable in workman’s overalls than formal dress, Anton had had little time or opportunity for an education. ‘So there are great lapses in his knowledge of art, literature and…history,’ Marie said. ‘But he’s an expert engineer and electrician, and a first rate pilot. Big, solid, trustworthy, he has not a penny except what he earns with his own hands.’”

Ileana and Anton’s wedding took place on July 26, 1931. It was a sad affair with the princesses’ mother, Queen Marie in tears and the princess herself sobbing as she knelt before the queen in a ceremonial fashion after the nuptials. The princess, who loved Romania, knew her marriage meant exile and separation from the Romanian people.  

“Follow that little bridge if you want to see Mother Alexandra’s  Mother’s grave,” Emmanuel said, indicating a small wooden bridge near the entrance to Transfiguration.

I told myself I’d visit the grave the following day after getting settled in at St. Bridget’s House, the small house where the princess spent her last years. A number of guest houses, a chapel, the central monastery area and nuns’ quarters lined the long road that cut through the middle of Transfiguration. St. Bridget’s House was the last building before the beginning of a dense wooded area. Emmanuel gave me a quick tour of the house. My eyes went directly to a small but substantial library in the living room where I  would discover several of the princess’s books (signed Ileana, 1956), not Mother Alexandra. 

Before Emmanuel departed, I reached into my pocket for a tip but he reminded me that he was “well compensated.”

This was the princess’s last house, the house where she recuperated after breaking her hip and where she had her office in the living room. Old photos on the wall showed a large desk placed before the picture window that looked out over fields, woods and mountainous hills beyond. Pennsylvania as Transylvania! I imagined the princess pacing back and forth gazing at the same landscape I was looking at. 

In this room the princess no doubt pondered the wide scope of her life. When as a child she had played and swam at the beach with Alexei, son of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. In the famous photo of Alexei and Ileana in which Ileana is clutching Alexei’s arm, her girlish smile buried in a head of curls. 

She comes across as a kind of Romanian Shirley Temple while Alexei — his eyes slanted leftward — seems focused on someone or something of a sinister nature happening behind the camera.  

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.