Princess Maria of Romania

Princess Maria of Romania (; – ) was the only child of Prince (later King) Carol I of Romania and Elisabeth of Wied.

Life Princess Maria was born in Bucharest as the first Princess of Romania that was also of the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, on . After a month, she was baptised as a Romanian Orthodox at the monastery of Cotroceni (near the site of the present-day Cotroceni Palace). In her family, the young princess was nicknamed "Mariechen" Everyone who knew Maria described her as a beautiful and precocious young child, as she was said to look at maps and identify different countries for fun at the age of only two and a half. The coffin was covered with white satin, criss-crossed with silver lace ornaments and was as large as one for an adult, because the infant princess' body was enclosed in several decreasing size caskets placed one inside another. After the religious service in the Romanian Orthodox rite, the cortege walked through the palace gardens to the burial place next to the palace church. Those gardens were the favorite playing grounds for the young princess, where only half a dozen days previously she had played with her nurse.

Legacy Maria's parents were devastated by her death. On 5 May that year, Carol wrote to his father Karl Anton, Prince of Hohenzollern, that he and Elisabeth intended to move to the Cotroceni Palace, in order to be closer to the resting place of their infant daughter:

In another letter to Lascăr Catargiu, he wrote:

Maria's death worsened the relationship between Carol and Elisabeth, and they did not have any further children. In 1875, Karl Storck created a bust of the sleeping princess which was erected by her tomb. This bust inspired Elisabeth to write many emotional poems. When Queen Elisabeth died in 1916, according to her wishes, her daughter's remains were exhumed and the casket placed on her coffin for the public procession. Mother and daughter were then buried together in the same tomb at the Cathedral of Curtea de Argeș. At the Elisabeta Palace, an 1880s style piece of furniture contains a plaster-mold of the infant princess.

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