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This is exactly right. Hello. Karen and George are here with breaking news. In addition to our regular weekly podcasts,
My Favorite Murder is now doing a new third episode and it's called Rewind with Karen and Georgia. We re-listen to our earliest episodes and share favorite moments, talk about the lessons we've learned along the way and give important case updates. So whether you're a day one listener or a brand new murderino, join us as we rewind to the very beginning. Rewind with Karen and Georgia is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Goodbye.
The Royal Palace, Sofia, August 1943. And King Boris is dining with a friend.
The friend's a tall man, about the same age as the king himself. From the way he sits, straight-backed in his chair, you can guess he's had a military past. And when he stands up briefly to reach for the serving dish, it's clear he has a stiff leg, a slight limp, probably a war injury.
It's just the two of them at the table. A private dinner. The servants have been dismissed, so it's the friend who offers the king a second helping. I'm convinced that something was put into his soup. You know, he had dinner with somebody alone and fell ill after dinner suddenly. Who did he have dinner with? I think some assistants.
who worked with him, and fell ill after that. The friend's name is Jordan Sevov. He's an architect by trade, but in the last year or so, he's somehow become the king's closest advisor. Other more experienced assistants have been pushed out. Sevov's very comfortable in the royal presence.
And we can make an educated guess about what was in that serving dish. Nobody even remembered what the menu was, but my father loved mushrooms, there's no doubt, so... Mushrooms, the king's favourite dish. Was it mushrooms that made Boris ill? Because that meal, it turned out to be the king's last supper.
The next morning, Boris collapsed, and as he lay on his sickbed, doctors noticed his skin was covered in those brown blotches we've heard about, as if he'd been poisoned. And never really recovered. That's all I know. It's a shocking possibility. Was the king betrayed by his closest confidant?
From Blanchard House and Exactly Right Media, this is The Butterfly King. I'm Becky Milligan. Chapter 8. The rest is history.
We're in Kew, in West London, not far from the National Archives actually, where we began our search for evidence about who killed Boris. But today we're not looking for dusty old documents. We're looking for plants, poisonous plants, or to be more precise, poisonous mushrooms.
which is why we're at Kew's Royal Botanic Gardens, because it happens to have the largest and most comprehensive fungi collection in the world. My work was mould! That's Kew's senior researcher, Erina Droginina. And if you didn't catch that, because I sure didn't,
She said "mould". Yes, I'm a mould person. You know, for a moment I thought you said "moulds" and then I thought you meant "spies". I thought suddenly we're talking to someone in the spy world. Anyway, all right, so moulds. Moulds, yes. Oh, interesting. And of course also mushrooms. Irina works with all kinds of mushrooms. The good, the bad,
And the very bad. They are those that produce antibiotics. They also produce a lot of toxins as well. Guess which mushrooms Irene is most keen on? The really deadly ones. The thing is that mushrooms, they usually have not a single toxin, but they have a cocktail of toxins. In other words, if they get into the wrong hands and the right mouth, poisonous mushrooms are pretty effective killers.
But there aren't as many lethal varieties as you might think. If we talk about all really deadly poisonous fungi that can kill, there are maybe less than 100.
So if King Boris was poisoned by mushrooms, are there any obvious suspects in that top 100? There is a particular poisonous one that is called Amanita phalloides. In plain English, it goes by the name of death cap. Basically, the death cap does exactly what it says on the tin. It kills you.
Then there's another prime suspect. We can also talk about a very interesting and a very dangerous fungus that is called a webcap. So we have the webcap and the death cap, twin toxins with a single murderous aim. And they're pretty commonplace. Where do I find them? In the forest? Really? Any forest? Any forest, yeah, why not? In Bulgaria as well, of course.
So somebody wanting to kill Boris, somebody like his architect friend Sevov, for example, would have had easy access to deadly mushrooms. I mean, Vrana Palace has its own mini forest. We went walking in it with the king's aide, Yavor, and guess what he pointed out? It's full of mushrooms in the garden now.
But are these lethal mushrooms easy to spot? What does a death cap look like? It's usually pale in colour, slightly greenish, whitish and looking similar to a classical mushroom. Really? Like an ordinary mushroom that you'd chop up and put in an omelette? Yes, so there is this possibility to confuse them.
Ah, now that's interesting. And it makes me think, I need to consider a much less dramatic scenario. What if Boris accidentally poisoned himself? We already know that Boris loved to spend time in the forests, among the flora and fauna, looking for rare plants. Perhaps he also did a bit of foraging.
Now Simeon told us that Boris was knowledgeable about fungi. My father knew a lot about mushrooms. But Boris had a lot on his mind. The war, the unhappy alliance with Hitler, how to protect Bulgaria's Jews. Is it possible he just got distracted and picked a poisonous mushroom by mistake? Then, unwittingly, just handed it to the royal cook? It's certainly possible.
But Irina doesn't believe that a botanist like Boris would make such a basic error. If the person has even superficial knowledge, I believe that this mistake is very unlikely because usually people that like to collect or pick mushrooms in the forest, they should know them. So I don't think the king do this mistake.
Okay, I think we can rule out Boris accidentally poisoning himself, but that puts Boris's architect friend back in the frame. I want to tell you a bit more about Jordan Sevov, because there's definitely something fishy about him. In the last three years of Boris's life, it was Sevov who had the king's ear, and he'd infiltrated the palace in the most extraordinary way.
Here's how it happened. When Boris married Queen Giovanna and she moved into Vrana Palace, the king's sister Eudoxia felt, well, a bit of a spare part. So she decided to move out. And it was the well-known Bulgarian architect, Yordan Sevov, who was commissioned to build a villa for Eudoxia.
Suddenly, Sevov found himself at the heart of the royal circle. And once the war started, Sevov frequently began showing up at the palace, unannounced, for private audiences with King Boris. And Boris really took to him. He was impressed by Sevov's intelligence. He started to ask Sevov's opinion on the political dilemmas of the day,
And it wasn't long before he began asking Sevov for his advice. The king's other aides and advisers felt squeezed out and they started to become seriously worried. In fact, Sevov had such power over King Boris that behind his back people called him the Bulgarian Rasputin. He came to the palace whenever he chose to. He practically had his own key. But here's the thing.
It turns out that Sevov was a staunch admirer of Germany and of Hitler. Now, the royal children grew up in difficult times, murderous times, when trust was hard to come by. So they'd been schooled in keeping Stumm whenever there were any visitors at home. What I remember is that
Did the Queen suspect that Sevov was not entirely trustworthy? Was Sevov being paid to infiltrate royal circles?
Boris had fallen out with Hitler, remember? So is it possible that Sevov bumped off Boris, maybe to hand power to his brother Kirill, who might be more sympathetic? The reason I say that is because just a few weeks after Boris died, Kirill went to meet Hitler.
It's really eerie watching the newsreels. Boris' little brother, downcast, walking in his big brother's footsteps, saluting the Führer. It's particularly chilling because Kirill and Boris look incredibly alike. You can only really tell them apart because Kirill's wearing a black armband. You almost feel like you're watching a ghost.
So did the Nazis hope Kirill would be more pliant to their demands? Did they think the little brother would be easier to manipulate once the big brother was out of the way? It sounds plausible. So let's return to the knight in question, that supper. One thing is nagging me about it. I mean, kings have food tasters, don't they?
No. No? Never. Never. This was sort of, I don't know, in Roman days. I think he means Julius Caesar might have had a food taster. But the king of Bulgaria? Not so much. Turns out Boris was pretty lax about his personal security. And also, he liked to move around, I mean, without any fuss or bodyguards or what have you, which is so necessary nowadays.
The only rule he had, he would never return on the same route that he had gone to a place because he had had a tense on his life. But if Boris was poisoned, wouldn't it have been pretty obvious to him? I mean, doesn't a toxic toadstool taste pretty foul?
Irina Drozhenina is our mycologist or mushroom expert. Some poisonous fungi, they are known to have some bitter taste, but these ones that are really poisonous, they are tasteless. They're tasteless. They don't even taste nice. You can't die having had a beautiful mushroom pie or something. It would just be a tasteless mess. God, how awful. I know. I'm getting carried away again.
But of course what Irina really means is that the deathly mushrooms would have been undetectable. The king just wouldn't have noticed them mixed into a sauce or a pie. He'd have tucked in as usual, with gusto. So time to ask Irina the crucial question. Is mushroom poisoning, though, a reliable way to kill someone, to carry out a murder?
Yes, it is reliable. They could increase the concentration and make a powder, of course. Because for the dead cup, you need only a quarter of a cup to kill a person. So Sevov could have even sprinkled a toxic mushroom powder onto the food. And what's more, those killer mushrooms cover their tracks like nothing else.
Because you can eat one, feel a bit dodgy for about 24 hours, and then feel fine again until it's way, way too late. They are very dangerous because the poisoning appears sometimes two weeks or three weeks after the poisoning. So Sevov could have slipped Boris that poison weeks before the last supper. He was a regular at the royal dinner table.
But how come the doctors didn't clock that Boris had food poisoning? I mean, that's pretty basic first aid, isn't it? Asking someone what they've eaten. And the symptoms of mushroom poisoning include nausea, headache, flushing and heart palpitations.
It's really difficult to prove because, you know, you feel sick, you see the doctor, and the doctor asks, "What did you eat yesterday? What did you eat the day before?" But nobody asks you, "What did you eat two weeks ago or three weeks ago or a month ago?" Right? Yeah, they would just say, "Oh, heart attack." They wouldn't have detected the mushroom toxins. Exactly. That's very interesting because they could get away with murder, whoever it was.
Have I just solved this murder? Was it the architect Sevov on behalf of the Nazis in the dining room with toxic mushrooms? In theory, that seems perfectly possible. But did he really have the opportunity to orchestrate his murderous plan? Obviously, you have to administer it well. Yes. Because they could just push that little bit of the nice pasta with that lovely mushroom sauce to one side and stick to the potatoes. Yes.
And then what do you do? A comedy of errors then. How do you get rid of it then? The problem is, Sevov would need to have eaten exactly the same dish as the king, or the king would have become suspicious. So if Sevov ate the same thing as the king, how come he didn't die too? I guess it's possible he took an antidote.
Except, Irina tells me there are no reliable antidotes for death cap or web cap mushrooms, even today. I'm starting to feel less convinced. And isn't it all a bit too convenient? Because there's a very real possibility that Sevov was framed as a
The other palisades were jealous of him. They hated his influence, his bad influence as they saw it, over their beloved king. So when Boris died, a rumour began to spread. A rumour that Sevov had been found at home counting out gold bars, Nazi blood money for bumping off Boris,
Simeon thinks that's all bunkum — bunkum put out by the communists. Afterwards, the propaganda tried to, of course,
blame him for all sorts of things and said that there were ingots of Nazi gold with the, what do you call it? - Swastika. - The swastika. - Swastika, yeah. - As though the Nazis, if they had poisoned my father would be that idiotic as to give a ingot with their signature on it.
Well, come to think of it, I suppose it does sound a bit like a bad movie. A tad obvious. Point taken.
I'm ruling out Sevov and the Nazis. But the mushrooms? I have to say I'm now certain that was how Boris was killed. As for who did it, well, I now have a very clear idea, and we'll come back to that very soon.
I want to pause our murder investigation for a moment because I need to tie up some other loose ends. We've been focused on Boris's murder, but Simeon and Maria Luisa have lived whole lifetimes since then, long and extraordinary lifetimes, despite being haunted by their father's death.
So you'll remember that a year after Boris died in 1943, the Red Army marched into Bulgaria. Simeon and Maria Luisa were 7 and 11 years old. The Soviets promptly shot most of Boris's old government and the royal household, including Kirill and Sevov, actually. Poor Queen Giovanna and her children were pretty much kept under house arrest.
And then in September 1946, a referendum, albeit heavily rigged, abolished the monarchy. Bulgaria was declared a republic and the Queen and her children were asked to leave the country. Asked to leave is a bit of a euphemism. Let's face it, they didn't really have a choice. At first, the royal trio went to Alexandria in Egypt, where the Queen's own father was also in exile.
Later, General Franco, the nationalist dictator of Spain, granted them asylum. So the family settled there. Simeon stayed. And Maria Luisa eventually married and moved to New York. But their hearts stayed firmly in Bulgaria. They wondered if they would ever be able to go home. I always hoped one day, but against hope. And then one day...
The Berlin Wall fell in '89 and shortly thereafter the Bulgarians got rid of that regime and the possibility was there. After the wall came down, communist regimes across Eastern Europe collapsed. Simeon was desperate to return to his homeland, to his kingdom, Bulgaria. But Simeon knew he had to be cautious. He'd no idea how he'd be received so many years after he'd left.
Would he be welcomed or met with hostility? During Maria Luisa and Simeon's exile, the communists had painted a dark picture of the royal family. The Bulgarians were told they were thieves who didn't care a jot about Bulgaria. Simeon was made out to be an arch-villain. People were told all kinds of derogatory or hostile things or silence.
When Simeon thought about returning home after half a century of absence, he wondered if anyone would even show up. So in 1991, he sent a special envoy to test the water, to see how the Bulgarian people, newly emerged from the Iron Curtain, would react to blue blood in the country. And Simeon knew just the right person for the job. So my brother called me and said,
Maria Luisa arrived at night. The remnants of the old communist regime were not happy. The old party loyalists turned off all the street lamps from the airport to Sofia to make her journey as difficult as possible. Not a good omen, perhaps, but...
The Bulgarian people felt very differently. They lined the streets waving torches and lighting her path with bonfires. Remember, the last time Maria Luisa had seen her homeland, she was just 13 years old. The crowds were unbelievable. I never expected anybody to sort of, you know, remember anything because it's almost two generations, 50 years is two generations.
And I went out on, not on the balcony like the Queen, but on a terrace and said to them, you know, you're not here for me because I was a child. But you remember my parents and it's the love for my parents that you are here applauding. It's very moving, very, very moving. It was an unbelievable, you know, dream that came true. And then in 1996, it was her brother's turn.
When the people learned Simeon had touched down, the bells of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral rang out in his honour. The last time Simeon had heard those bells, he was six years old, a little boy in shorts and white knee socks, trying not to cry at his father's funeral.
Actually, it's, I mean, paradoxical because it's such a joy. But the sound of those bells was when my father died. So there was a sudden return to precisely that very sad moment in '43. I realised that it brought me back all of a sudden with half a century for a few minutes. The boy king finally returned home aged 59.
Even now, Simeon stares at the ground when I ask him about that moment. He's still humbled by the welcome he received. To me, it was a very personal moment. It was unbelievably or indescribably moving because after all 50 years in exile, finally to set foot back on the country when I was born in.
Watching the news footage is incredible. Crowds literally weep for joy. Women run alongside Simeon's train, pressing flowers into his hands. It's as if they're welcoming the Messiah or King Boris himself. One of the major factors was that it was Boris' son, the little king, who's coming back, you see.
It was a tremendous reception. Nobody had expected this. And it was really quite extraordinary. Sounds like a fairytale ending, doesn't it? A happily ever after. Except this was only the beginning. Simeon's homecoming wasn't plain sailing. After 50 years behind the Iron Curtain, he knew Bulgaria certainly didn't have the stomach for another monarchy.
He knew he couldn't claim the throne again. And I thought, that's not fair. These people have been 50 years under a totalitarian system. So 50 years of such a system, who am I to tell them, look guys, my system is better, let's have a go. But people really believed the little king, as he was still known, could help them.
Simeon had spent his exile largely in Spain. He was a Westerner. He'd done military training in Pennsylvania. He'd worked in finance in Europe. The Bulgarians felt sure he'd be able to turn their fortunes around. And Simeon, well, Simeon wanted to help. He wanted to continue his father's legacy. It's what he felt he was born for.
The sense of duty is something which is hammered into us, but one can or should help one's country. It's part of the monarch's thinking. It might sound old-fashioned, but that's what it is. OK, there's something I've kept back from you, but I'll let Simeon tell you himself. No way I want to sound derogatory, but I demoted myself by becoming prime minister.
Yep, you heard that correctly. In the summer of 2001, King Simeon, on a landslide victory, became Bulgaria's prime minister. His party was called the National Movement for Stability and Progress. He helped Bulgaria become a member of NATO and paved the way for Bulgaria to join the European Union. So at first, things went well. And then they didn't.
The Bulgarians wanted much more progress than they got. They wanted a big boost to their living standards. But that didn't happen. So in 2005, Simeon was ousted as prime minister and his party became a junior partner in a coalition government.
Four years later, his party failed to win any seats at all, and Simeon resigned from politics. The fact that we are a democracy is essential, and the fact that we're in the EU is just as important. But there was another problem. You'll remember that when the royal siblings went into exile, the Communist Party nationalized all their palaces and properties. Simeon and Maria Luisa wanted them back.
So they went to the European Court of Human Rights. And that infuriated many Bulgarians. They argued Simeon was only interested in enriching himself, not his people. Simeon's hurt by that. We serve. We don't use the system for ourselves. The royal siblings lost their court case. They didn't get all their palaces back.
But they got the one they really wanted, Vrana Palace, King Boris' sanctuary, the place where he loved to spend time with his two little children, Maria Luisa and Simeon. Right, back to who killed King Boris, the question that Maria Luisa and Simeon have never stopped asking. Well, there's been a development, because something rather extraordinary has happened.
Back in the summer of 2023, Russia launched her first lunar mission in nearly 50 years. It was a pretty big deal in terms of national pride. The unmanned spacecraft was due to land on the south side of the Moon, but the rocket crashed. The mission ended in complete failure. It was a massive blow for Russia's prestige.
Fast forward a few weeks and the man responsible for that embarrassment suddenly finds himself gravely ill in hospital. For two weeks, leading space scientist Vitaly Melnikov battled a very strange illness and then he died. And Russian state media reported he died of mushroom poisoning. Sounds very suspicious to me,
and very familiar. In recent years, there's been a huge spate of mysterious deaths in Russia. But Irina Drozhinina, our mushroom expert, believes she knows where the inspiration came from. These attempts to poison, they all come from the Cold War, KGB, and I think that all started before the World War II. I think that all started in late '30s for sure.
Why does she think that? Well, remember what our Bulgarian historian George Bozdeganov told us. From 1938 to 1953, the NKVD, that's the Russian Special Service, maintained two laboratories for the production of deadly poisons.
toxicological one and bacteriological one. And remember, those laboratories had a specific brief not just to silence Stalin's enemies, but to do it… …without leaving any traces. In other words, they fatally poisoned people and made it look like their victims had died of a heart attack, which is, of course, what's written on King Boris's death certificate.
And it turns out our mushroom expert Irina, who's based at the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, knows quite a lot about those poison laboratories. There were laboratories with very bad intentions. Very bad intentions indeed. And Irina should know, she's Russian. She knew people, not friends of hers, who worked in those labs.
That's how she knows they were specifically working on… Mushrooms. Yes, mushrooms. I believe crime related to mushrooms or connected to mushrooms. Irina thinks that in their secret pre-war laboratories, the Soviets were tinkering with fungi toxins, making them more concentrated, trying to mimic them.
basically creating a chemical weapon based on mushrooms. Perhaps one that was fit to kill a king. I think the Russians, they maybe learned from nature about these toxins and tried to optimize them and synthesize something similar. Okay, deep breath. I'm going to ask Irina outright. ♪
So knowing what you know about the KGB, the laboratories and so on, and what we've told you about Boris and how he died, all those symptoms, do you think he was murdered? I cannot exclude this. Could be. It could be. I cannot exclude this. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to call it. After months of investigation, I believe King Boris was murdered by the Soviets.
Boris's murder has the Soviet hallmark stamped all over it. They had the means, and with their embassy next to the palace, the Soviets had plenty of opportunity to slip the synthetic mushroom poison into the king's food or drink. As for their motive? Remember, Stalin dreamed of spreading communism across Eastern Europe.
and Bulgaria was a vital foothold for anyone trying to consolidate their power in the region. The only problem was that there was a king in the way, a very popular king. And if it was the Soviets, the plan worked. Just one year after the king's death, the Red Army marched into Sofia, and the Iron Curtain swallowed up Bulgaria.
So I believe King Boris was murdered by the Soviets, or by the Bulgarian communists with help from the Soviets, using synthetic mushroom-based poisons from those dreadful chemical weapons labs. That certainly coincides with Maria Luisa's suspicions when I spoke to her a few months ago, when she said that she was convinced something had been put in the King's soup.
and about who she thought did it. Who had the greatest advantage to get rid of him? The Soviet Union. But although Simeon admits he has questions over his father's death, he wouldn't point the finger at anyone. He wouldn't even allow himself to say the word murder, however hard I tried to catch him out. I know you might want to keep it private, but just for us, in your guts, who do you suspect may have killed
If your father was murdered, who could have murdered him? I'm sorry, I cannot even to myself, because it would be cheating. Really? Yes, because, again, I say I like to have things documented, proven, tested, what have you. I've never let myself into thinking, ah-ha. Really? Because then...
Where does objectivity go? I'm sorry, very disappointing. But then I listened to the tape again and I realised I'd missed something. But still, I think that there must have been foul play as much as he died in a strange... I mean, the pathology itself is a bit strange. So there you have it. There must have been foul play.
How can foul play mean anything other than murder? And as we were packing up, the royal siblings were chatting. Maria Luisa suggested to her brother they may never find out the truth until they die themselves and find themselves in heaven or the other place. And we'll never know until we go up there, if we go and find out really what it was. We find it down better.
I have no intention of going down there. That's where we might find the really ugly side of everything. Oh, some of the people who are down there, yes. They know what it is. Six months on from that original interview, I want to tell Maria Luisa what I've discovered. So I discuss the idea of telling her with my producer E.J.,
She must want to know where we've got to with this investigation. So it'll be really interesting just to say, this is where we've got to. So you know she called me? Oh, really? Her Royal Highness called me. What, on the phone? On the phone. This number came up that I didn't know and all of a sudden, and it was her Royal Highness. Is there a reason why she didn't call me?
I mean, no, really. Was it just she liked you better? She'd heard about you using the King's comb, Becky. Oh, no! And almost, you know... That was you, wasn't it? No, I didn't do that. I didn't. It was you. Well, I told her. I told her it was you. I told her it was you, so she's only been calling me. Oh, my God, it was you, wasn't it? No, it was you. For the record, it wasn't me. Anyway, here goes. I make the call.
And what we also found out, it could be more specifically mushroom poisoning. It's fascinating. We've never heard the mushroom version that you are bringing up. So that's something totally new and I'd love to hear more about it.
I tell Maria Luisa, too, about the recent death of the Russian rocket scientist Vitaly Melnikov, who had displeased Moscow and who mysteriously died of suspected mushroom poisoning 80 years after Boris's death. She's not surprised. Yeah, I'm sure that the Russians are experts. Well, we've seen it in the last years, how many people they managed to poison or half-poison people.
etc. I mean, that's their specialty. That some mushroom powder might have been put in his food that evening and he fell ill after that and never, you know, came back. That I believe. Precisely how they did it isn't really important for Maria Luisa. They achieved what they wanted. If it's the mushrooms who killed him, that's it. And, you know, that's part of history, I guess. Part of history.
but a part of history that's perhaps been overlooked, forgotten. And I think King Boris's story is an important one. Yes, there's a stain on his legacy. There'll always be a question mark in some people's minds over whether he could have done something to save the 11,000 Jews of Thrace and Macedonia, over whether he should have been more outspoken about the plight of the Jews in Bulgaria itself,
But no one can dispute one fact, that under Boris's watch, not a single Bulgarian Jew was deported to the death camps. For the country, he kept the Bulgarians out of the war, saved the population, saved the Jewish population. What more do you want? A saint is maybe too much, but a hero for sure. There's no doubt Boris's children loved him, and both Maria Luisa and Simeon have been deeply marked by their father's sudden death.
But how should history remember King Boris III of Bulgaria? People have really strong opinions about the king. He reigned in such difficult times, during the deadliest conflict in human history. He was forced to make impossible choices, which were applauded by some and abhorred by others. Perhaps that's why it's so hard to uncover the truth about Boris's death.
Because even after 80 years, everyone, every witness has an agenda. And everyone can vilify or exalt Boris's story to match their own chosen narrative. There are historians who admire King Boris's courage, his diplomacy, his kindness, while others deplore his cowardice, his underhandedness, his indifference,
Our historian, Tessa Dunlop, has often been critical of Boris, but she believes he has something important to teach us, particularly today. The headlines never really went big on Boris because he was what we might call in today's terms as a bit of a sort of technocrat monarch, a little bit dull. She means he was really into the nitty-gritty, a guy who liked detail.
When we talk about today's world of nationalism, you know, of populism, and if we want to understand how to manage that nationalism, we need to not look at the flamboyant figures, but actually at the technocrat monarchs like Boris, who managed to hold down the excesses on both the left and the right. He is your model man in an era of intolerant nationalism.
And that's what's most important to Maria Luisa and Simeon, that history will remember their father in context, generously. I think we've come close to solving the mysterious death of Tsar Boris III, as close as history will allow us to come. To us he's King Boris, to Maria Luisa he's her much-missed papa. As a loving father, a very patient father,
But all that other stuff, you know, about who and when, you know, it doesn't change anything, you know. We lost him. So to dwell for 80 years over that subject, I really don't. I pray for his soul. I feel him very close many times. But the rest is unfortunate history. Let's leave King Boris, where he was happiest, at Vrana Palace.
Strolling in the grounds in his old floppy hat, waving his butterfly net. Behind him, two little children run barefoot through the tree line, chasing their father's shadow. MUSIC
The Butterfly King is a production of Blanchard House and Exactly Right Media. Hosted by me, Becky Milligan. It's written and produced by Emma-Jane Kirby. Original music is by Daniel Lloyd-Evans, Louis Nankmanel and Toby Matamon. Sound design and engineering by Toby Matamon and Daniel Lloyd-Evans. Artwork by Vanessa Lilac.
Voice acting by Mark Umbers. Special thanks to Jana Pajowska and Veso Vlav. The managing producer is Amika Shortino-Nolan. The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pye. The executive producer and head of content at Blanchard House is Lawrence Grizzell. For Exactly Right Media, the executive producers are Karen Kilgareth, Georgia Hardstark and Daniel Kramer.
with consulting producer Kyle Ryan. The Butterfly King is inspired by the book Hitler and the King by John Paul Spencer. Follow The Butterfly King on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen so you don't miss an episode. If you like what you hear, leave us a rating and a review.