1904

Why do I care about Kara George? Who is this brigand from the Balkans who set Turks running and impressed Napoleon with his military genius!

Besides a great story, and it is, George killed Turks and liberated Serbia. No small thing. He is a king still today in the minds of monarchists and sympathizers. 

But who is he to me and why do I care?

Because George is the great grandfather of my grandfather Paul, a man I knew, and adored.

So the chain is closed in four generations.

My grandfather Paul was born into a fairytale life. Which soon ‘Fate’ robbed of him. Or you could blame Churchill, yes WC. I do. And in my book I detail WCs dirty finger swirling the pot, lives be damned unless they were English. Except these are my family members, and I care deeply.

And I can forgive, and understand: Patriotism and nationalism. 

But what I cannot forgive: Churchill personally didn’t like Paul, knew him and took the first instant he could to thrust his ego swollen envies into the sides of my grandfather’s life.

He had the power to do it, and he did it. That’s called choice. And that’s the basic principle of decency. WC had none.

The research I did for this book educated me on all these nasty secrets.

Paul was a child soldier and a military man. But before that he was an abandoned orphan, not coddled by his mama like WC.

But Paul is Serb and Russian and he is Kara George’s descendent. So it hurt him, but it didn’t kill him. Serbs are tough, even the poets.

My grandfather’s life was beyond extraordinary, but I never knew  it. He never complained. 

I shall do that for him. Eff Churchill and Anthony Eden, and how fitting that after Paul attended Oxford in 1913, almost exactly a hundred years later I will be there to speak for him. And I’ll be blunt, because I am Serb and I am American. So buckle up!

This is the subject of my new book. I’ll be speaking at the BODLEIAN LIBRARY 22 March, 10am.

DYNASTY- A TRUE STORY is on Amazon

The Family Palace, Belgrade, Serbia

My new book is not ‘Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Serbian history or my older sister Catherine’s time on the 1980s TV show, nor even a tell-all of a curious childhood!  

Black George is the subject of my book DYNASTY – A TRUE STORY

Black George was Napoleon’s hero.

Why?

For his military genius. I can’t imagine how the news got out and reached Paris but it did. And the news was a Serb named George Petrovic, derisively called ‘Black’ George by his enemies, was giving the Ottomans an almighty headache.

He was Napoleon’s hero because George was a simple man, a farmer without pretensions, and he bucked the order of the day and took matters into his own hands. He organized weapons and rebels and he battered all hell out of the invaders and sent them packing.

George was deemed Liberator of Serbia and he was offered the title of King.

No thanks, said he and went back to his family and his farming. He didn’t want any kingdom he just wanted his life back.

Napoleon, a Corsican, became the King of France by sheer will.

George was offered a Kingdom, in his own homeland, and he declined. But George was not left free to live a life of peace. 

An ambitious fellow Serb rebel, a man named O, had designs.

O was a businessman at heart. Not a farmer, not someone to get his hands dirty. But he was shrewd.

While George was being hunted by Turks , O went to the Pasha in Constantinople and proposed a deal.

‘I want a Principality and you want George’s head?’ O laid a trap for George and George’s severed head was delivered to the Pasha. 

O’s deal had many strings attached to his agreement with the Turks. As they say in Serbia O was willing to take it up the ass to get what he wanted. 

I hope he enjoyed it. It launched a hundred year war between the rival royal families. 

📚 Book In English 📚

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dynasty-True-Story-Christina-Oxenberg/dp/070437448X

OR direct from Publisher 📚

http://quartetbooks.co.uk/shop/dynasty/

USA

https://www.amazon.com/Dynasty-True-Story-Christina-Oxenberg/dp/070437448X

In Serbian

Any Laguna Bookshop or

https://www.laguna.rs/laguna-bukmarker-predstavljena-kraljevska-dinastija-unos-5151.html

The battered Keys islands are deceptively restored, new full grown trees are stuck in the ground along the highway, each surrounded with a festoon of crude posts holding them in place. Is this to convince people nothing happened? Maybe it pleases the eye of the tourists who still come. Some to gape.

But it doesn’t fool the locals who appear dazed and shattered. The smiles are gone. I went to visit our friend George, Mr Fournier, to deliver him some more books, and I could not find his home. 

I drove around and about and I saw many razed areas, I saw lots that had been cleared of junk and of dwellings.

Brother of mine I am talking to you. Please look into your past as you walk the rivers of your life, keep to the center, slow and steady, and be ready when you fall to grip a slick boulder, just because, this is the way as you trudge carefully headed to the mouth. Say hello for me if you find your way.

I drove around Big Pine Island where block after block are trashed. Occasionally people are living in scary squalor, more and more the debris is taken away. I was looking for Mr Fournier.

Walk in the water brother, up the center where the rocks are mighty  and you can steady yourself. Catch your breath.

I drove around but I could not find him. I could not find his trailer. Not a hint.

Don’t machete through the jungle. Not you, you trudge through the water. Take it slow so life can’t take you down, not today.

But nature will win and the winds will blow out to sea and the islands will rejuvenate. Only the people will come and go.

I couldn’t find George. I saw eery cleared flat patches where I thought for sure his home had sat. I found nothing. Nothing Brother, one day you find out that’s all you got.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/book-loitering-with-good-intentions-1288852.html

George, Helen, Alexander and Paul in a sailor suit

1903 in a palace in Serbia the King and Queen trembled.

In retrospect maybe it was inevitable, he was ever more despised and she was outwardly loathed.

Reasons were he was weak and indecisive and she was barren and positioning her brothers to succeed. The desire to hold on to power is too heady for some, and despite reason or logic they cling. To their own eternal peril. 

One night when the King and Queen were attempting to sleep the noise of turncoat guards surging about the palace and toward the royal chamber alerted them. Legend hints they hid in a closet, adding only seconds of terror to their lives before bayonets were plunged in inexorably ending one hundred years of intermittent rule.

So concludes the House of Obrenovic though they would be supported by Churchill due to his aunt’s affair with an Obrenovic ex-King. The connection was so strong rumors later circulated Churchill himself had Obrenovic blood…

The House of Karageorgevic was back in the saddle, literally, when King Peter I rode through the streets of Belgrade upon being invited to serve. After years in exile Peter was ready. He gathered his three children, and a stray cousin who had been orphaned becuse his parents gave him away as they had better things to do.

This orphan, my grandfather HRH Prince Paul of Serbia, was born in Russia, but his parents were emotionally disconnected, even from each other, and he was dispatched to his uncle Peter.

Thus he was part of the entourage packed up to Serbia. My grandfather was 10 years old. He was given a set of pistols and a room in the palace and inculcated in military life.

He had no specific role, He was an extra. His personal love was art. Life was somewhat normal until 1934 when his cousin King Alexander, the eldest son of Peter, was assassinated and my grandfather became Regent. 

DYNASTY, A TRUE STORY my new book 📚

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dynasty-True-Story-Christina-Oxenberg/dp/070437448X

OR direct from Publisher 📚

http://quartetbooks.co.uk/shop/dynasty/

I visited our friend Mr Richard G. Fournier and I found him on his tricycle several blocks from his home. I pulled up slowly beside him, slid open my passenger window when he turned to me and declared, ‘I didn’t do it’! We both laughed.

I asked him if he’d liked the book I left and he hesitated a moment before answering, ‘I don’t read Serbian.’

‘Sorry!’ I squealed, and I rushed out from my car and went to the trunk and from a box extracted an English version of GENIUS (short stories) and also my single copy of DYNASTY (new book).

‘What’s this?’ Mr Fournier asked.
‘It’s a history book about Napoleon’s hero,’ I said and opened to the page with the quote.

His eyes lit up.
Mr Fournier was already smiling as he flipped through the pages.

I listened as he read the quote from Napoleon Bonaparte talking reverentially of his military hero, and contemporary, a Serb named George who took on the Ottoman Empire, and won.

Mr Fournier said, ‘George sounds like a big man for a little guy. I will read this first.’

When I wrote last Sunday how it’s a family tradition to lose possessions, domiciles, even a country, what I was thinking of was my mother’s line of my ancestry. I knew scant but after my research I learned about this Serb named George Petrovic, a simple herdsman born to pacifist parents and yet innately a leader, a righter of wrongs, and an irrepressible rebel warrior. George is the grandfather of my grandfather.

It is typical in America to look forward. It’s encouraged. But if you allow yourself the luxury to research your past you might better understand yourself and others. For me looking back and learning about ‘Black’ George was the beginning of a love affair with Serbia.

George has many names: George Petrovic, Black George, Karageorge, etc. Serbia is fascinating and complicated. I’ll explain next Sunday.

PRE ORDER DYNASTY

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dynasty-True-Story-Christina-Oxenberg/dp/070437448X

OR direct from Publisher

http://quartetbooks.co.uk/shop/dynasty/

www.carolmunder.com

Losing everything, overnight, seems to be a family tradition.

Luckily for me I am not encumbered with materialism. Objects annoy me because they need care and after you have lost everything, more than once, you learn to let go of this ‘can’t live without it’ mentality.

Except for two pieces of artwork, a photogravure by Carol Munder and a watercolor by Susan Sugar, two of my favorite artists.

I didn’t pack them into my get-away car when I left before the storm because I never envisaged not returning.

I left two days before the hurricane hit and life spiraled into a roller-coaster. I couldn’t get reliable information from the island except for spotty transmissions of ‘Don’t come back yet, there’s no electricity’, to ‘Don’t come back yet, I think your house took a hit’, to ‘Don’t come back at all, your house is toast’.

So began four months of rolling around America with strangers asking, ’So, where do you live?’ Amazing I didn’t punch anyone in the face.

I stayed with friends in Alabama which was lush and lovely as a spoonful of honey. I stayed in New Orleans and had my dreams crushed. I rented a cottage in Mississippi and observed the local lore of gamblers and fishermen and doughnuts with maple syrup and bacon.

An exhilarating ride is the ferry to Galveston, a barrier island off the coast of Houston, a tranquil beach resort on the edge of ruin as casinos come to town.

I was invited to stay by an angel in the Hamptons and I had occasion to catch my breath and recalibrate. One day a snowflake fell and I phoned FEMA, and lo! ’Pick a hotel in Key West,’ the agent proposed.

I sped south. My first stop was the cratered former dwelling to retrieve my art collection. I trod the rocking floorboards with a doff to the family curse. 

A friend’s neighbor died, now a place to hang my paintings. That’s the Key West shuffle.

www.JohnMartini.com

Our friend George from Big Pine Key has been struck off his tricycle, a hit and run as it’s known. He is not dead but suffers a coagulating mess on his right shin.

Since the hit he has been housebound and tending to the wound. He’s a soldier. He makes light of it. 

Less offensive to him than the injury itself was the behavior of the offender not stopping to ask after his wellbeing.

‘He never touched his brakes,’ said George, with a certain disbelief as he massaged the pain from his blemished leg, ‘and he smashed my ride!’

He tells me his greatest pleasure is pedaling around his neighborhood and calling out hellos to friends and picking up the daily newspapers to read at the west end of Lime Street with its view of the mangrove islands.

I packed him and his cane into my car and we went to the bicycle repair shop. I walked him in and met the workers. Local lads, slim and dirty and young who treated him like the dignified elder he is, they politely kid with him, evidently pleased to see him.

‘This is my granddaughter Betty,’ George points at me with his cane and tells me he will ride himself home. I waved from the doorway and dislocated from the scene. That hit and run stayed on my mind. An out-of-towner? Locals don’t behave like this.

A while later, early one morning, I rolled on by to check on him and all signs of life were in order although he was not outside. His wheelchair was parked directly beside the front door along with his tricycle, easily within reach. An orderly gentleman. 

My extraordinary friend David Wolkowsky told me the secret to a long life is, ‘No big shocks’! 

Thus I elected not to strike George’s front door and instead placed a book of mine on the seat of his chariot, with a note and a chunk of coral to hold it down.

At the 36th Annual Key West Literary Seminar this year the theme is Writers of the Caribbean, and some I knew but most I didn’t. A friend slipped me a pass and I attended the talks and readings.

There were many gems on the roster and for me one such was Nicole Dennis-Benn, a lady from Jamaica who ventured to our land as a teenager for university and has since taken up residence in Brooklyn. I liked her writing and I liked her presentation but mostly it was her charisma that was inescapable. She is also kind. I mention that not because I think it a necessary quality in a writer, but because it is a fact. I saw her take a small action, to remember to inscribe a book of hers, the fulfillment of a promise.

This gift was not for me but I was the conduit of the inscribed book, and I will be delivering it to Dymond the Jamaican housekeeper Ms Dennis-Benn chatted with at David Wolkowsky’s annual Literary Seminar kick-off party to whom she promised the book.

It’s such a simple action, a promise made and kept. But on the other side of things, Dymond, is an older woman who I know cries at night for her children and her family whom she cannot legally visit due to visa restrictions. I saw Dymond’s eyes were lively just from the interplay of words with the young author and her familiar accent.

My job was to facilitate the exchange and sure enough an inscribed book was left exactly as promised.

Nicole Dennis-Benn is a star in a galaxy already lit and yet still her presence burns through. On the stage she holds her own in the most ladylike manner.

You meet people all your life, some are better than others, most are better than me, in one way or another.

Occasionally a truth shines, cutting through layers of practiced cover, and you see the good in good people.