JUGOSLAVIA: Royalties & Slava Cake

Ever since Benito Mussolini married off a sloe-eyed daughter of Italian King Vittorio-Emanuele III to earnest Tsar Boris of Bulgaria, France and her “Little Entente” Allies have been working to counteract Il Duce’s supposed influence on the Bulgarian Court. Both Little Entente kings—Carol of Rumania and Alexander of Jugoslavia—have been courting Boris. A “Three-Kings Conference” of Boris, Carol and Alexander is in prospect at Sofia on Jan. 31, the day after Boris’s next birthday. Last week the Tsar of the Bulgars took his Italian-born Tsaritsa to Jugoslavia to break a slava cake. Fifty years of Balkan bitterness and two wars were supposed to have been blotted out as Tsar Boris and his svelte Tsaritsa loanna were received by King Alexander and plump Queen Marie of Jugoslavia, sister of Rumanian King Carol. After four days of gaudy Balkan pageantry, the four sovereigns saw priests break crosswise into four chunks a holy slava cake (plain white flour and yeast) in King Alexander’s incense-filled Court Chapel. Digging a hole in each chunk with knives, the priests poured red wine into the holes, after which Royalty and Priest drank the wine and kissed each other. According to Jugoslav Orthodox custom, Guests Boris and loanna thus became figuratively “of the same family” with Host Alexander and Hostess Marie. Too scandalized to protest was the Vatican, which protested vigorously but in vain when Rome’s Catholic loanna was remarried in Sofia by an Orthodox priest and her first-born child was baptized Orthodox (TIME, Jan. 23).