Prince Kyril of Bulgaria

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Prince Kyril of Bulgaria, Prince of Preslav (November 17, 1895 - February 1, 1945) was the second son of Ferdinand I of Bulgaria and his first wife Marie Louise of Bourbon-Parma. He was a younger brother of Boris III of Bulgaria. In September 1936 Prince Kyril accompanied King Edward VIII on a whistle-stop tour of Bulgaria.

Present at the death of his brother, Tsar Boris on August 28, 1943, Prince Kyril was appointed head of a regency council by the Bulgarian parliament, to act as Head of State until the late Tsar's son, Simeon II of Bulgaria became 18.

Prince Kyril, with the widowed Tsaritsa, led the State Funeral for his brother Tsar Boris III on 5th September 1943 at the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia, thereafter across the city to the main railway station where the funeral train waited to take the body to the 12th century Rila Monastery in the mountains. Thereafter the three consecutive governments made efforts to extricate themselves from Bulgaria's agreements with Germany, notably that which permitted their use of the railway to Greece and the German troops stationed along it for protection. A Bulgarian Delegation travelled to Cairo in an attempt to negotiate with the United States and Great Britain but failed, the latter refusing to meet them without the participation of the Soviet Union.

Despite Sofia's continuous diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, at the end of August 1944 that country declared war on Bulgaria and Soviet armies crossed the Romanian border. The Fatherland Front, a coalition of the Communist Party, the left-wing of the Agrarian Union, the Zveno group, and a few pro-Soviet politicans who had returned from exile in the Soviet Union, executed a Soviet-backed military coup on the 9 September and seized power.

On the night of 1 February 1945, Kyril, former Prime Minister Professor Bogdan Filov, General Nikola Mihov, and a range of former cabinet ministers and advisors were executed. Their death sentences had been pronounced earlier that day by a "People's Tribunal."

[edit] References

Bulgaria in the Second World War by Marshall Lee Miller, Stanford University Press, 1975.
Boris III of Bulgaria 1894-1943, by Pashanko Dimitroff, London, 1986, ISBN 0-86332-140-2
Crown of Thorns by Stephane Groueff, Lanham MD., and London, 1987, ISBN 0-8191-5778-3
The Betrayal of Bulgaria by Gregory Lauder-Frost, Monarchist League Policy Paper, London, 1989.
The Daily Telegraph, Obituary for "HM Queen Ioanna of the Bulgarians", London, 28 February 2000.