Princess Natalija of Montenegro’s Lost Passport
Princess Natalija of Montenegro’s Passport Comes Home After a Century
Original account by Géraldine Cerf de Dudzeele, Paris (first published here in 2013). Retold in my own words, with additional context from my research.
Who Was Princess Natalija of Montenegro?
Natalija Konstantinović was a Montenegrin princess by marriage whose passport spent nearly a century away from her own descendants before finding its way home. Born in Trieste in 1882 to Alexander Konstantinović and Milena Opuić, she descended from the Obrenović dynasty that had ruled Serbia through most of the 19th century. In 1902 she married Prince Mirko Petrović-Njegoš and became Princess of Montenegro. The marriage produced five sons, two of whom died in early childhood, and it ended in divorce in 1917, a year after the royal family had already been forced into exile. She later remarried in England, to Count Gaston Errembault de Dudzeele, and the couple had two daughters, Hélène and Anne-Marie.
Natalija kept close ties to the Italian royal family throughout her life. She spent summers with Queen Elena of Italy and King Victor Emmanuel III, where she was known affectionately as “Aunt Lily” and her sons were nicknamed Miki, Poli, and Emmanuel, the last after the King himself. She died in Paris on 21 August 1950. You can read more of her documented biography on Wikipedia.
What the Passport Itself Tells Us
This is a large-format Italian passport, roughly 45 by 45 centimeters and folded twice, issued in Rome in 1917 under the reign of Vittorio Emanuele III. Its pages trace Natalija’s movements through France, Switzerland, Italy, England, and Belgium, carrying around 30 visas, seven of them diplomatic, including one from the Swiss Legation in Rome dated 1919. Beyond the small holes at the fold lines and light wear near the blind-stamped Italian seal, the document survives in genuinely good condition, a testament to how these oversized diplomatic-era passports were built to last.
A Granddaughter’s Account: Family Memory Behind the Document
The passport’s real weight comes through in what Géraldine Cerf de Dudzeele, Natalija’s granddaughter, shared with me after finding my original article online. Her account fills in what the paper alone cannot: a first marriage entered for political reasons tying Serbia to Montenegro, a husband whose tuberculosis claimed two infant sons in 1908, and a family history marked by repeated loss. Of the sons who survived infancy, Emmanuel died in 1928 and Paul in 1933, both from tuberculosis contracted at boarding school in England. Only Michel, known as Micky, survived into adulthood. During the Second World War, Micky declined Mussolini’s offer to restore him to the Montenegrin throne he had held in exile since his father’s death in 1917.
Géraldine’s account also traces the family’s later entanglements with 20th-century history: a connection by marriage to Count Carlo Sforza, the Italian foreign minister who broke with Mussolini and led the Italian anti-fascist movement from Belgian exile, and a family tradition holding that her great-grandfather may have been the unofficial father of Hergé’s father and uncle, which some have offered as one explanation for why Tintin’s adventures so often wander through the Balkans. I can’t verify that particular claim through any archival source, so I’ll flag it here as family lore rather than documented fact.
Why This Return Matters to Collectors
A passport returning to its original family after a century is rare enough on its own, but this one also shows how collector research can reconnect scattered family history. The document had passed through a fellow collector’s hands after surfacing in Paris, and it was only through Géraldine encountering my earlier coverage of it that the connection back to her family became possible. For anyone building a collection around royal or diplomatic-era travel documents, it’s a reminder that provenance research sometimes does more than authenticate an object. It can hand a family back a piece of its own story.
If you’re interested in another royal-adjacent document with a similarly layered history, I covered a travel document issued to an Egyptian princess under Nazi-era restrictions in a separate piece.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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