Prince Paul of Yugoslavia
Regent of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1893-1976)
Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, also known as Paul Karađorđević (Serbo-Croatian: Павле Карађорђевић, romanized: Pavle Karađorđević, English transliteration: Paul Karageorgevich; 27 April 1893 – 14 September 1976), was prince regent of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia during the minority of King Peter II. Paul was a first cousin of Peter's father, Alexander I.
Early life
Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was the only son of Prince Arsen of Serbia, the younger brother of King Peter I, and of Princess Aurora Pavlovna Demidova. His mother was the eldest granddaughter on one side of the Swedish-speaking Finnish philanthropist Aurora Karamzin and her Russian husband, Prince Pavel Nikolaievich Demidov, and on the other side of the Russian Prince Peter Troubetzkoy and his wife, Elisabeth Esperovna, born Princess Belosselsky-Belozersky.
At the time of Paul's birth, the House of Karađorđević was in exile, as the Serbian throne was held by their rivals, the House of Obrenović. Paul spent his early years in Geneva, where he grew up a lonely and rather neglected child in the household of his uncle, King Peter Karađorđević. Among his relatives, he was affectionately known as “Toto.”
The long and violent feud between the Houses of Karađorđević and Obrenović, which had begun in 1817, came to an end in 1903 when a military coup overthrew and brutally killed King Alexander I and his wife, making the Obrenović line to be extinct. In the aftermath, Peter Karađorđević returned to Serbia to ascend the throne as King Peter I. That same year, young Paul accompanied his uncle to Serbia for the first time.
In 1912, he chose to attend the University of Oxford—a rare decision among the Serbian elite, who typically pursued their studies in either Paris or Saint Petersburg.
Paul was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was a member of the exclusive Bullingdon Club – a dining club notorious for its wealthy members, grand banquets and boisterous rituals. Cultivated like his closest friends Prince George, Duke of Kent, and Sir Henry Channon, his outlook on life was said to be British. Paul often said that he "felt like an Englishman".
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q313128. VIAF identifies the subject as 34742163. The Library of Congress control number is n81007910. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1893, 1976, 1817 and 1903.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prince Paul of Yugoslavia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.