Livadia

August 19, 2011

After breakfast we headed out to the White Palace in Livadia. It was the summer palace for the Romanovs’. I personally cannot get enough of anything related to the Romanov saga, it is such a fascinating story with a tragic ending.

Nicholas II, the Tsar that didn’t want to be a Tsar. He was very much in love with his wife. His beautiful daughters and a single heir who had the bleeding disease. The family enjoyed an extremely privileged life as the empire fell down around them.

The mother to the Tsar, the princess of Denmark, Dagmar, fled to Livadia with other exiled Romanovs after her son abdicated the throne. When she received word that her sons, daughter in law and grandchildren were exiled, she refused to accept it. She finally fled Russia at the urging of her sister, the Queen of Denmark.

The White Palace was the personal residences of the Romanov’s. There are personal pictures of the family throughout the house. Besides the bedrooms, there are rooms for schooling the Children. The Palace sits on a hill. You can see the Harbor in Yalta from the house. Clearly this was a privileged life.

The White Palace in Livadia was used in another historical event. It is the site where Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt met in 1945 and determined the shape of post WWII Europe. President Roosevelt even brought his own bed and took it with him when he left. He was very ill at the time and died two months after the Yalta Conference.