Today is the 55th anniversary of the death of Crown Princess Märtha, the lost queen of Norway. The Crown Princess died at the National Hospital in Oslo at 4.28 a.m. on 5 April 1954, aged only 53. She was mourned by an entire people but of course most of all by her husband, the future King Olav, who never got over her death.One of Crown Princess Märtha’s last surviving contemporaries, the legendary former party secretary of the Labour Party, Haakon Lie (now 103), wrote about her in his latest book Slik jeg ser det nå last year: “What was a tragedy was that Crown Princess Märtha died much too early. I think Märtha was intellectually superior to Olav, and she was in all ways a great girl. We lost a great queen with her”.
Crown Princess Märtha died just two weeks after her silver wedding. To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the wedding the Royal Court recently published a special report on the royal wedding of 1929 at their website.
http://www.kongehuset.no/c26939/nyhet/vis.html?tid=77613
The above photo shows Kirsten Kokkin’s statue of Crown Princess Märtha in the Palace Park in Oslo, unveiled in 2007. Similar statues were erected in Washington, DC in 2005 and in Stockholm in 2008.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are welcome, but should be signed - preferably by a name, but an initial or a nick will also be accepted. Advertisements are not allowed. COMMENTS WHICH DO NOT COMPLY WITH THESE RULES WILL NOT BE PUBLISHED.