Descendant of Emperor Karl of Austria Princess Maria Galitzine has died.
According to Dailymail, she died tragically after suffering a sudden aneurysm, leaving behind her two-year-old son.
The 31-year-old was living in Houston with her chef partner Rishi Singh when she suffered a fatal cardiac aneurysm on May 4, just six days shy of her 32nd birthday.
The news was confirmed in an obituary in The Houston Chronicle published on Wednesday, in which her son Maxim was described as ‘the apple of her eye’.
The mother-of-one was laid to rest last Friday in Houston.
The obituary read: ‘Our Maria passed away in the Houston morning of Monday, May 4th, 2020, from a sudden cardiac aneurysm.
‘She was born in 1988 to Prince and Princess Piotr Galitzine in the city of Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.’
Born on 11 May 1988 in Luxembourg City, Maria was the daughter of Prince Piotr Galitzine, a Russian aristocrat, and Archduchess Maria Anna of Austria, the daughter of the Archduke Rudolf of Austria.
He was the youngest son of Emperor Charles I of Austria and Empress Zita of Bourbon-Parma (the last Emperor and Empress of Austria).
Princess Maria’s great-grandparents were exiled from Austria following the First World War, with her great-grandfather Charles I of Austria dying in 1922.
Meanwhile, when her great-grandmother Zita died aged 96, the family were given permission for her funeral to be held in Austria.
Maria’s mother met her dad, a descendent of the Russian aristocracy, at a bar in New York and they went on to marry in 1981.
Piotr is the CEO and Chairman of TMK Ipsco, a subsidiary of the Russian steel pipe giant OAO TMK.
Princess Maria was one of six children, with three sisters and two brothers, Princess Xenia, Princess Tatiana, Princess Alexandra, Prince Dimitri and Prince Ionn Teimouraz.
In an interview with the The Houston Chronicle in 2018, her sister Princess Tatiana, who lives in Houston, said that they had been raised normally, and only really remembered that they were royalty when they were invited to ‘royal weddings’.
She revealed that while their parents never publicised their royal status, the family always knew what it meant to be royal.
Maria returned with the family to Russia as a five-year old in 1993, attending the German School of Moscow, before moving to Belgium to study at the College of Art and Design school.
She focused on her skills as an interior designer, and went on to pursue the career following her graduation.
For several years she worked in Brussels and Chicago, before settling in Houston.
It was there she met her future husband Rishi Singh, who is the executive chef at Hotel Derek in Houston.
The couple were married in an Orthodox religious ceremony at her parent’s home in 22 April 2018.
They welcomed their first son, Maxim, shortly before their wedding, on 10 February 2018
