New York, July 9, 2015
Princess Irina S. Bagration with her mother-in-law, Mother Tamara, Abbess of the Mount of Olives Convent in Jerusalem
Princess Irina S. Bagration passed away this morning July 9th at 2 am in New York. The funeral will be at 10 am on Saturday, July 11th at Holy Trinity ROC in Astoria, NY. Burial will be at the Novo Diveevo Convent in Nanuet, New York following the service.
Born Irina Czernysheva-Besobrasova on 21 Sep 1926, at Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, the daughter of Sergei Aleksandrovich Besobrasov and Countess Elizabeta Cheremeteva.
She became the second wife of Prince Teymuraz Constantinovich Bagration, at the age of 23 in 1949.
Prince Teymuraz was born at Pavlovsk on 21 August 1912. His father, Prince Constantine Bagration-Mukhransky (1889–1915), a member of the Mukhrani branch of the Bagrationi family, formerly a royal dynasty of Georgia, was an Imperial Russian Army officer and was killed in World War I. Teymuraz's mother, Princess Tatiana Constantinovna of Russia (1890–1979), was the third child and oldest daughter of Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich of Russia and his wife, Elisabeth Mavrikievna, née Princess Elisabeth of Saxe-Altenburg.
After her children were grown and married, Princess Tatiana took the veil at Geneva in 1946. She died as Mother Tamara (named so after the medieval Georgian queen Tamar, a remote ancestor of Tatiana’s first husband), Abbess of the Mount of Olives Convent on 28 August 1979 in Jerusalem.
Teymuraz Bagration left Russia after the 1917 Revolution. During World War II, he served in the Royal Yugoslav Army. After the war, he emigrated to the United States and joined the Tolstoy Foundation in 1949. His marriage to Princess Irina took place on 27 November 1949 at New York. They had no issue. He became Executive Director in 1979 and led the organization from 1986 until his death at New York on 10 April 1992.
On 5 July 2007, Princess Irina presented her husbands’ unique archive to the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia.
I made the acquaintance of Princess Irina in the late 1990s, and enjoyed numerous telephone chats, in which she shared her memories of her cousins, Grand Duke Gabriel Constaninovich (1887-1955), author of Memories in the Marble Palace, and Princess Vera Constantinovna (1906-2001)—both children of Grand Duke Constantine and Grand Duchess Elisabeth.
