Countess Geraldine Apponyi de Nagy-Apponyi
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Countess Geraldine Margit Virginia Olga Maria Apponyi de Nagy-Apponyi (6 August 1915 - 22 October 2002) was briefly Queen Geraldina of the Albanians.
She was born in Budapest, Hungary. Her father was Julius (or Gyula) Count Apponyi de Nagy-Apponyi (or: Nagyappony; (August 15, 1873 Nagyappony, now Slovakia – May 27, 1924 Budapest). Her mother was Gladys Virginia Steuart (July 18, 1891 – November 19, 1947), an American, a daughter of a millionaire from Virginia and a distant relative of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. Geraldine's paternal grandfather, Ludwig (or Lajos) Apponyi (May 2, 1849 Baden bei Wien – December 11, 1909 Budapest), was a high official in the Habsburg court. Geraldine's mother’s father John Henry Steuart (1831–1892) was a diplomat who served as American Consul to Antwerp.
Geraldine's parents met in Paris in 1912 at a dinner in Austria-Hungary’s embassy, and they married in 1914.
When the empire of Austria-Hungary collapsed, the family went to Switzerland. In 1921 they returned to Hungary. However, when Geraldine's father died, her mother decided to take their three children (Geraldine, Virginia born in 1916) and Julius or Gyula; 1923–1946) with her to the resort of Menton in the south of France.
When Geraldine’s mother married a French officer, her father’s family insisted that the children moved to their grandmother’s house in Hungary in order to get their education in Hungary. Their mother agreed. They were sent to the Sacred Heart boarding school in Pressbaum near Vienna. The children spent their vacations in their grandmother’s house and in with their uncles and aunts at their family manor.
On 27 April, 1938 in Tirana, Albania, she married King Zog I of the Albanians. She was a Roman Catholic and he was a Muslim; they met when she was working selling postcards for a living at the Budapest National Museum. She was known as the "White Rose of Hungary" and was raised to royal status as Princess Geraldine of Albania prior to her wedding.
Zog's rule was ended with the invasion of Albania by fascist Italy in April 1939. From 1946 she lived in exile in Greece, Turkey, England, [[Egypt], United States, France, Rhodesia, Spain, and finaly in South Africa. King Zog, a chieftain who was elected president of Albania and then declared himself king in 1928, died in Suresnes, France in 1961.
She had one child:
In June of 2002, she was invited by forty members of the Albanian parliament to return from South Africa to live in Tirana. She returned, but continued to assert that her son, Leka, was legitimate ruler of Albania. Apparently as a result of the change in climate, she developed respiratory problems, for which she was treated in a French hospital in August 2002.
She died in a military hospital in Tirana, after having suffered recurrent pulmonary problems and four heart attacks. She was buried by the Central House of the Army and with full honours, including a funeral oration at the cathedral of Shen Pjetri, on October 26, 2002 and interred in the public cemetery of Sharra, Albania at "The Plot of VIPs".et:Geraldine Apponyi