Alžbeta Brezáková

Alžbeta Brezáková (1921 – 24 April 2015) was a Slovak nurse and the third wife of Ferdinand I of Bulgaria. The daughter of a castellan employed by the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha-Koháry, she served as a royal nanny and as personal assistant to the deposed Tsar Ferdinand while he lived in exile in Germany. They were secretly married in 1947. She was 60 years younger than her husband and was the first Slovak and the first commoner to marry into the Bulgarian royal family. The validity of their morganatic marriage was questioned by Slovak writer Anton Hykisch, whose family was also employed by the Tsar.

Biography Brezáková was born in 1921 in Coburg and was of Slovak descent. Her husband, who had been deposed in 1918, lived in exile in Germany. The year before their marriage, his grandson Simeon II of Bulgaria, was deposed and the monarchy abolished under the formation of the People's Republic of Bulgaria. Ferdinand died one year after the marriage took place, on 10 September 1948. After his death, Brezáková returned to Slovakia, where she remarried and gave birth to a daughter, named Hildegard.

Validity of royal marriage The Slovak writer Anton Hykisch wrote that he doubted the validity of the marriage between the Tsar and Brezáková. Hykisch wrote that Ferdinand was "very proud of his origins" and that he did not believe the Tsar would enter "into a misalliance marriage." He stated that Ferdinand may have "arranged some theater with church dignitaries" but that no official documents exist regarding the marriage and that after Ferdinand's death, Brezáková did not claim rights to his estate and immediately left Germany for Slovakia, where she remarried.