Patrick Comerford
As I was walking around the churchyard at Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick, yesterday afternoon [7 June 2017], I came across what must be one of the most unusual graves. The grave of Prince Milo of Montenegro faces the great west door of the cathedral, and lies beside the boundary wall, looking out onto the banks of the River Shannon.
Prince Milo Petrović-Njegoš (1889-1978) was a prince of Montenegro and was a direct descendant of Radul Petrović, brother of Danilo I (1670-1735), the first Vladika or Prince-Bishop of Montenegro from 1696.
Montenegro achievbed de facto independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1711 but only received formal international recognition as an independent principality in 1878. In 1889, Czar Alexander III said Prince Nikola of Montenegro was Russia's ‘sole sincere and true friend’ in the Balkans.
Prince Milo was born later that year in Njeguši on 3 October 1889. He studied at the Military Academy in St Petersburg, Russia, and there he became a personal friend of Czar Nicholas II and Czarina Alexandra.
Montenegro declared itself an independent kingdom in 1910. During World War I, Prince Milo was the commander of the Lovćen Brigade, and led his division into Albania in 1916. After World War I, the king was deposed and Montenegro was forced into the newly-formed Yugoslavia.
Prince Milo left Montenegro in 1919, and for more than half a century he moved around the world as an exile, engaged in a diplomatic campaign to secure the restoration of recognition of Montenegro as a sovereign, independent state.
After some years in exile in Italy, Mexico, Shanghai and England, Prince Milo pursued Helena Grace Smith from Haworth in Yorkshire to the US, and they were married in Santa Barbara, California on 3 September 1927. A year later, their only child Milena was born in Los Angeles, named after the last Queen of Montenegro.
But Milo abandoned his young family the following year, returned to England and settled in London, where he ran an antiques shop with the half-Irish Doreen Powell before moving to Dublin, where he set up another antiques shop.
Meanwhile, his cousin, Prince Michael Petrović-Njegoš, inherited the royal claims of his predecessors in 1929 while he was living in exile in France. He survived arrest and internment on Hitler’s orders for refusing to head up a puppet state in Montenegro.
At the outbreak of World War II, Prince Milo was at the centre of a society scandal in Ireland when he eloped with Gladys (McClintock), wife of Henry Arthur Bruen of Oak Park in Carlow. She was from Rathvinden House, in Leighlinbridge, Co Carlow, and the Bruens had been married for 26 years.
Milo and Gladys moved into a house she owned in Errisbeg, near Roundstone in Connemara. There in the 1960s, they became friends with David Allen, who ran Mullen’s auction house in Bray for many years, and his wife Noreen, who ran Clifden Antiques.
When Gladys Bruen died in 1969, however, she was buried in the Bruen mausoleum in Carlow and Prince Milo stayed on in the house in Errisbeg, where he became a virtual recluse. There, he continued to maintain his friendship with David Allen, who agreed to buy the house and land, allowing the prince to continue living there until he died.
For most of his life, Prince Milo was estranged from his only daughter, Milena. But as an adult she renewed her acquaintances with him after 39 years and visited him in Ireland several times.
He died in Barrington’s Hospital, Limerick, on 22 November 1978, and was buried in a small plot he had bought by in the churchyard at Saint Mary’s Cathedral. His daughter Milena attended the funeral. The modest and unassuming stone marking his grave is fading and in yesterday’s rain it was almost impossible to read the wording.
Recently, his Connemara home, now known as the Prince’s Cottage, was on the market with an asking price of €470,000.
Meanwhile, Princess Milena, a retired school principal, continued to live in California with her husband Malcolm Thompson. Like her father, she hoped to see Montenegro become an independent country once again. In 2001, she published her biography of her father, My Father, the Prince.
But the story does not end there, for there is a strange connection with Montenegro that links the humble gravestone at Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Limerick with an ornate casket Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin.
Marko Zekov Popović was the Hereditary Royal Standard Bearer of Montenegro, a member of the the Montenegrin National Committee, and the author of Where is Montenegro? The Martyrdom of a Small Nation (1926).
When Popović died in London on 26 October 1934, he was cremated and his ashes were brought to Dublin, where they were put in an ornate casket on a shelf in the south aisle of Christ Church Cathedral, with an accompanying plaque. The urn was probably placed there by Prince Milo Petrović or his daughter Milena Thompson.
Prince Milena died in Los Angeles on 14 February 2005. In the following year, an independence referendum was held on 21 May 2006, and Montenegro declared independence on 3 June 2006.
When Donald Trump brusquely shoved aside the Prime Minister of Montenegro, Dusko Markovic, at the NATO summit in Brussels last month it was yet another rude rebuff for the tiny Adriatic state, almost a century after the Western allies had forced it to be subsumed into the greater Kingdom of the Southern Slavs or Yugoslavia.
Once again, Putin must have been pleased with Trump’s rude behaviour. Montenegro’s government accuses Russian intelligence of plotting a failed coup last October while Moscow accuses Markovic and his government of being a mafia clique.
As the Econmoist reported, the meeting in Brussels was supposed to be a celebratory preparation for Montenegro’s entry into the western alliance this week (5 June 2017). But perhaps the Montenegrins will have the last laugh when Trump receives what may yet be an imminent heave-to before his term of office comes to an end.
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