Life in Exile
The royal family settled in England, first at The Ritz in London, followed by a brief stay in the Sunninghill/south Ascot area in Berkshire in 1941 (near where Zog's nieces had been at school in Ascot). In 1941 they moved to Parmoor House, Parmoor, near Frieth in Buckinghamshire with some staff of the court living in locations around Lane End.
In 1946, King Zog and most of his family left England and went to live in Egypt at the behest of King Farouk, who was overthrown in 1952. The family left for France in 1955. In 1951, Zog bought the Knollwood estate in Muttontown, New York. The sixty-room estate was never occupied and Zog sold the estate in 1955.
He made his final home in France, where he died at the Hôpital Foch, Suresnes, Hauts-de-Seine on 9 April 1961, aged 65, after being seriously ill for some time. He was survived by his wife and son, and is buried at the Thiais Cemetery in Paris. On his death, his son Leka was pronounced H.M. King Leka of the Albanians by the exiled Albanian community.
His widow, Queen Geraldine, died of natural causes in 2002 at the age of 87 in a military hospital in Tirana, Albania. Albania's communist rulers abolished the monarchy in 1946, but, even in exile, the royal family insisted that Leka Zogu was Albania's legitimate ruler until his death on 30 November 2011.
Read more about this topic: Zog Of Albania
Famous quotes containing the words life in, life and/or exile:
“St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.”
—Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990)
“What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“the bird in the poplar tree
dreaming, his head
tucked into
far-and-near exile under his wing ...”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)