OPLENAC: At the wedding of his grandfather, King Aleksandar I of Yugoslavia, nearly a century ago, more than 100,000 people thronged Belgrade’s streets in heavy rain to celebrate. Prince Mihajlo Karadjordjevic’s wedding on Sunday was a somewhat lower profile event — covered by the tabloids but largely ignored by other media, leaving some Serbians completely unaware of the first “royal” wedding in decades.

The 30-year-old prince married Ljubica Ljubisavljevic, a Belgrade-born pharmacist, at the Orthodox Church of St George in Serbia, where members of the Karadjordjevic dynasty are buried.

Just 150 or so royalists gathered outside the service. Among them were members of the royal family including Crown Prince Aleksandar II, claimant to Serbia’s abolished throne. The Karadjordjevic dynasty was founded by Djordje Petrovic who came from a family of pig farmers but led the first Serbian uprising against Ottoman rule in the early 19th century.

Aleksandar was later assassinated in Marseille and succeeded by his son Petar II, who fled the Nazi occupation of his country just days after being proclaimed monarch at the age of 17. He spent the remainder of WW II in Britain but was prevented from returning to Yugoslavia by the communist regime of Josip Broz Tito, which abolished the monarchy. Petar died in the US and his family was allowed to return to Serbia by the post-communist authorities in the early 2000s, but today the royals struggle to stay relevant among citizens of the republic.

Published in Dawn, October 24th, 2016