Princess Ghika, A Royal Mystery from 1925 (100-Year-Old News)

Who was this woman? I read this Associated Press item at the Library of Congress newspaper archive yesterday, but when I went to discover her place in the Russian royal family, I turned up nothing. I looked at all of Emperor Alexander III's legitimate descendants and this woman wasn't any of them. Did "princess" mean something different to Russians 100 years ago? Was something lost in translation?

This is the text of the video; I wrote it yesterday:

Here’s a mystery from November 17, 1925. An Associated Press article relates the unfortunate death by household accident of a person called “Princess Ghika” in Grosswardein, Hungary, which is the German name for what, in 2025, is the Romanian town of Oradea. This princess was said to have caught fire and burned to death whilst cleaning a pair of gloves with benzene. But did this really happen, and was she a real person? 

Here’s the thing: The article also names the woman as “formerly the Russian princess Rowowa.” It says she was 23 years old. This means she would have been born in 1901 or 1902, but the only Russian quote-unquote princess born in those years was Grand Duchess Anastasia. Yes, the Anastasia you’re thinking of, the one murdered at age seventeen. 

The Russian monarchy, of course, had been abolished by the Russian Revolution in 1918, so there weren’t strictly speaking, any Russian royals in the year 1925, although there were a few Europeans claiming to be the rightful heirs to the abolished Russian throne around and about seven years later. None of them were named Rowowa or even Rowena or anything similar. 

So if this woman was related to the crowned heads of Europe, she doesn’t seem to have been Russian by birth or a very close relation to the family that included Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm and England’s Queen Victoria and her descendants. In fact, the deceased woman’s husband was said to be the adjutant of, quote, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. An adjutant is a military administrator equivalent to an human resources manager in a civilian organization. I put King Ferdinand in quotes because technically, Ferdinand of Bulgaria’s title was Czar. 

The Bulgarian monarchy had also been abolished by 1925, so the former czar of Bulgaria lived in exile from the throne, although he’s been allowed to return to Bulgaria’s capital city, Sofia. So this short item is sad, if true, but very confusing. Maybe a minor Russian royal named Rowowa died tragically in front of her minor military figure husband in 1925, but unless I’m missing an important clue, this doesn’t stand up to fact checking. 

Now, there was a European royal who died tragically from an accidental fire. In 1867, Archduchess Matilda of Austria, age 18, was smoking a cigarette. Her father, Archduke Albert [or Albrecht], hated smoking. When he entered the room, Matilda swiftly hid her cigarette behind her back, but in doing so, she set her dress on fire. Since the family had intended to visit the theater later that day, Matilda’s fancy dress was made of gauze, which is highly flammable. Then, thirty years later, the terrible Bazar de la Charite fire in Paris killed an appalling total of 126 souls, including Princess Sophia Charlotte of Bavaria.

Those things happened. A woman in Europe in 1925 probably did tragically end her own life unintentionally by using a flammable cleaning solution too near to the family hearth. Her royal status, though, remains a mystery.