Princess Ksenia’s father, King Nikola, was nicknamed ‘The Father-in-Law of Europe’ having successfully married off his daughters to the royal houses of Italy, Bulgaria, Germany, Serbia and Russia. His eighth daughter – Ksenia - chose a different route, carving out a place for herself as secretary and valued advisor to her father, becoming the first woman in Montenegro to drive, and developing a particular talent for photography (though a contemporary also described her as ‘a courageous and skilled shot with a pistol’).

This lecture shares the photographs she took during her years in what contemporary British traveller William Le Queux described as ‘the little city in the sky’, the brand-new Montenegrin capital of Cetinje, where the royal family had their palace before they were exiled to France in 1916. Despite her privileged life of garden parties and tennis, Ksenia’s photographic record also shows how she drove out to take beautiful photographs celebrating ordinary life in Montenegro among its schools, soldiers, fishermen, cooks, horses and villages.

This lively lecture draws on my research in the archives of Ksenia’s correspondence, and on collaboration with the staff at the National Museum of Montenegro (to whom thanks for permission for use of the photograph reproduced here, and those used in the lecture). It gives a face and a human narrative to the history and culture of a part of the Balkans which is just beginning to be visited by British travellers.