Bev. Cooke

The life of a princess isn't all fun-filled travel, handsome princes and beautiful clothes. It's also devotion to duty, sacrifice, and hard work. And if your country endures two world wars and a communist takeover, it means danger, exile and heartache. Princess Ileana of Romania endured this and more. But her Orthodox faith saw her through, and led her to the peaceful repose of monasticism. But that life included sacrifice and hard work as well, she was called to buidl the first English-language Orthodox women's monastery in North America - the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration in Elwood City, Pennsylvania.

ERRATA: On page 21, I refer to the "Germans and their Serbian allies" when I describe the invasion of Romania from Serbia by the Austian-German forces. This is a mistake. The Serbs never allied with the Germans, and I apologize to the Serbian people for that bit of careless writing. In point of fact, the Serbs fought hard and bitterly, and their armies continued to harass the German forces in WWI even after their land had been invaded and over-run by the Central Powers.

Royal Monastic has been nominated for the Word Guild awards for 2008 in the Young Adult category.

Royal Monastic wasn’t a book I thought of on my own. Conciliar Press asked if I would be interested in taking the project on. Until Jane, my editor, mentioned Mother Alexandra’s name, I had never heard of her. Heck, I barely knew where Romania was at that time. I knew some Romanians, they attended our church, and I liked them - Monalisa and Gabrielle and Costa were funny, kind and generous people whom I’d spoken to over lunch several times. Mira and her family were equally kind and generous, and I felt an immediate kinship with Valeria, Mira’s mother.

I googled “Mother Alexandra” and was stunned to learn that this monastic - this Orthodox nun - had been a princess! The more I learned about her, the more I admired and respected her and her parents and the more I felt I had to write about her, if only to get to know her better. It was a journey of a couple of years and almost a century and thousands of miles. I learned about Romania - her troubled history and the cohesiveness and tenacity with which her people clung to their national identity through invasion after invasion after invasion - in one 100 year period they experienced no less than 12 invasions.

I learned that Ileana, while born in Romania, had an ancestry that was the most illustrious in Europe - related to both Queen Victoria and the Tsars of Russia. I learned about the deprivation and heartbreak she experienced upon losing both her baby brother and her country when she was only seven years old, and how for the remainder of World War I, Ileana suffered such severe nutritional deficienies that she never really recovered. I learned that her brother, King Carol II, exiled her when she married, that she bore her six children in illness and almost lost her life with each one, and when allowed to return to Romania in 1943, it was to watch the Soviet Union invade and support a puppet Communist government which exiled her and her family in 1948. Yet through it all, her faith not only sustained her, it grew, to the point where, once her children were living their own lives, she and entered a monastery in France. An amazing woman, and it was a true privelge and honour to be able to write about someone who was able to identify with everyone she met, and yet, in so many ways, was always set apart.