Crown prince of Serbia fosters UPMC connection
Royalty visits Pittsburgh seeking improved medical care at home
The man who would be king of Yugoslavia was sitting Saturday afternoon in a Shadyside living room talking about telemedicine.
The operative word here is “would,” since there is no Yugoslavia anymore, and Crown Prince Alexander II of Serbia, 69, seems, on this day, far less interested in talking about reclaiming kingly titles than helping Serbia reclaim and rebuild its own medical system, using the expertise of Pittsburgh’s best doctors to do so.
So here he is, sitting with his wife Princess Katherine at the home of his good friends and hosts Robert and Eugenia Friedlander. He’s wearing a gray business suit, this son, grandson, great-grandson, nephew and cousin to just about every monarch, it seems, in Europe, pretender or otherwise. He’s actually one of the few who can claim kings as grandfathers on both sides — Yugoslavia on his father’s, Greece on his mother’s.
He and his wife have been guests of Dr. Friedlander, chair of UPMC’s Department of Neurological Surgery, who held a dinner Friday to raise money for one of the prince and princess’s pet projects — a telemedicine program linking up UPMC’s experts with doctors in Serbia.
“It’s prohibitively expensive to bring patients here,” explained Dr. Friedlander, who met the prince and princess 15 years ago in Athens through mutual
Eventually, the hope is, UPMC will be able to send its doctors to Belgrade to teach for short stretches of time, and bring Serbian doctors here for a month or two.
friends, since both his wife Eugenia and Princess Katherine are Greek.
Today, Dr. Friedlander’s department at UPMC, with 40 neurosurgeons, is the largest of its kind in the country. “The one thing we figured we could do, though, was help them with telemedicine, connecting the doctors seamlessly from Belgrade to Pittsburgh,” he said
There are infrastructure costs associated with that, but Friday’s dinner raised $25,000. Eventually, Dr. Friedlander hopes, UPMC will be able to send its doctors to Belgrade to teach for short stretches of time, and bring Serbian doctors here for a month or two.
Serbia already has benefited from the UPMC connection, he added. In February, a 2-year-old boy in Belgrade with a serious but difficultto-diagnose heart condition underwent surgery after a telemedicine consultation with a team of Children’s Hospital experts. And a young woman in need of a liver transplant traveled to UPMC’s hospital in Sicily, where she had the procedure.
“We are trying to leverage our international presence in every way with can. And in Serbia, it’s not just Skyping, per se. You have to walk through the process with them, make sure all the studies and tests have been done, with experts who have been doing this many times before.”
This kind of progress is pretty much what Prince Alexander envisions for the country he has only lived in since 2001 — a man who grew up virtually homeless while his parents led a restless life in London, New York, the south of France and Switzerland.
His grandfather, King Alexander, had named his country Yugoslavia in 1929 but became a victim of geopolitical unrest on a trip to France in 1934, when he and the French foreign minister were assassinated. Prince Alexander’s father, Peter, II became king, with three regents, at age 11. But in April 1941, after Germany attacked and occupied the country, he escaped to Athens, then, as the Nazis advanced, to Jerusalem, Cairo and London, where he established a government in exile.
Prince Alexander was born in London in 1945, technically in suite 212 at Claridge’s Hotel in London, but for a few hours declared Yugoslav territory, on orders from Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Later, when the young prince was baptized at Westminster Abbey, his godparents were King George VI and then Princess Elizabeth, now Queen Elizabeth II.
He clearly adores the queen, whom he has met frequently — all the royals in Europe seem to stay in close touch — but did he ever meet Churchill, the great World War II leader?
Therein lies a family story, as told to him by his father, King Peter: “Churchill apparently said he wanted ‘to see the boy,’ and I was brought to him. He patted me on the head and said it was time for bed.”
The prince attended Gordonstoun, a British boarding school, just two years ahead of Prince Charles. He then entered the British military, married, had three sons, and lived in New York, Chicago and later London with his second wife.
“The tragedy is that my father thought he was going to go back tomorrow, next week, or next month,” said Prince Alexander. But when King Peter died in the U.S. in 1970, he was buried at a Serbian monastery in Illinois, against his son’s wishes.
Since leaving London to live permanently in Serbia with his wife in 2001 — “a half a million people turned out to greet him,” Princess Katherine says proudly — he has become country’s top marketer, courting investors and promoting tourism by opening up the two palaces that belong to his family for tours. There’s even a website: www.royal.rs. And two years ago, the body of his father, mother and uncle were brought back to Serbia and buried in the royal mausoleum outside Belgrade.
It’s all in the name of repairing and restoring his broken homeland, battered by civil wars and world wars, communist dictatorship and the brutal leadership under Slobodan Milosevic, charged as a war criminal for his actions in the 1990s following the breakup of Yugoslavia.
When they returned, they found a country where only a third of all the medical equipment worked and another third was 30 years old, said Princess Katherine, who brought her longtime children’s health care foundation, LifeLine (www.lifelineaid.org) to Belgrade. On tours through the neighboring country of Bosnia “we’d hand out cards saying ‘we take aid, not sides.’ The point is we try to help everyone.”
A lively, dynamic woman, she freely admitted that when she first met Dr. Friedlander through mutual friends, she seized the opportunity “to make him my friend.” And when he was recruited five years ago from Harvard, “we followed him to Pittsburgh, to this famous health care facility and now every time I have a situation in Serbia, I say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll call Dr. Friedlander.’ The doctors now know he is there for him, and you can’t imagine mentally what that means to them. He is the first doctor in all my 25 years of trying to help our country who has opened his home to us.”
As for her husband, he is comfortable being who he is, even if he has not received reparations for his family’s property and possessions from the current government. There is no need for a referendum; he knows what his heritage is.
“I’m the heir,” he says simply, adding that “monarchy is not what it used to be. You have to make a difference in the lives of people,” he said, noting that when he returned in 2001 to his family’s palace in the compound where Josip Broz Tito had lived, he encountered the grave of the Yugoslav dictator’s young girlfriend, who had died of tuberculosis.
“It was one of those graves with red stars and Communist symbols, and I thought, I’m going to keep them. Supposedly Tito’s dog and horse are buried there too. I thought, of course I’m going to preserve this. Only dictators cleanse history.”