Teymuraz Bagration


Prince Teymuraz Constantinovich Bagration was a Georgian-Russian nobleman and an émigré in the United States where he served as President of the Tolstoy Foundation, a New York-based charitable organization.

Life

He was born at Pavlovsk, Imperial Russia, into a formerly sovereign family. His father, Prince Constantin Bagration-Mukhransky, 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 was a member of the imperial Romanov dynasty of Russia.
Teymuraz Bagration left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, first living in Switzerland and then settling in Yugoslavia. Prince Bagration graduated in 1932 from the Krymskiy Cadet School and then studied at the Yugoslav Military Academy. He served for ten years in the Guards Mounted Artillery Regiment of the Royal Yugoslav Army. During World War II, he served in the Royal Yugoslav Army. After the war, he emigrated to the U.S. and was invited to join the Tolstoy Foundation in 1949. He became Executive Director of the Foundation in 1979 and led the organization from 1986 until his death in New York in 1992.
On 5 July 2007, Bagration's unique archive was presented by his second wife, Princess Irina, to the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia.

Personal life

Bagration has been married twice. The first time he married Catherine Ratchitch, grand daughter of Serbian Prime minister Nikola Pašić on 27 October 1940: at the time he was 28 and she was 21, but the marriage ended with Catherine's death at the age of 27 years.
The second marriage was with Irina Czernysheva-Besobrasova, the daughter of Sergei Aleksandrovich Besobrasov and Countess Elizabeta Cheremeteva. Irina was an older sister of Xenia Czernysheva-Besobrasova, who married 1953 Archduke Rudolf Syringus, youngest son of Karl I of Austria, the last Austrian emperor. This marriage was celebrated on 27 November 1949 and took place in New York City. He was 37 and she was 23. There was no issue of either marriage.