Archduchess Gabriela appointed as Georgian Ambassador

  October 28, 2009 at 5:53 pm by

Archduchess Gabriela of Austria will be appointed as Ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to Germany by the Georgian President Mikhael Saakachvili; now her appointment has to be approved by the Georgian Parliament.

The Archduchess, who is a Georgian citizen since 2007, will replace the present Ambassador Levan Duchidze.

Archduchess Gabriela - from the website of the Presidency of Georgia

Archduchess Gabriela - from the website of the Presidency of Georgia

The reasons of the appointment of Archduchess Gabriela have been explained by Akaki Minashvili, Georgian Member of the Parliament and Chairman of Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Parliament: “She is a great friend of Georgia, who has been actively engaged on an informal level in defending Georgia’s interests in the European states throughout recent years”; other factors are her strong charity work in the country and her international renown as sculptor.

Archduchess Gabriela is the fourth daughter of Archduke Otto of Austria, the son of Emperor Charles I and Empress Zita, and his wife Archduchess Regina, née Princess of Saxe-Meiningen; she was born in Luxembourg on 14 October 1956, and grew up in Bavaria; she studied for two years Philosophy in Munich, and between 1978 and 1982 she studied art at the Munich Academy of Arts; she works as a sculptor, and her main works are abstract stainless steel sculptures.

She married in 1978 the Bavarian attorney Christian Meister, with whom she had three children (Severin, Alene and Lioba); the Archduchess and Mr. Meister divorced in 1997.

Since 2001 Archduchess Gabriela is an art professor at the Academy of Arts of Tbilisi, and between 2001 and 2006 she has been a professor at the Summer Academy of Arts in Neuburg an der Donau, in Germany; in 2007 she has installed in Tbilisi the Moument of the Rose Revolution.

With this nomination as Ambassador, Archduchess Gabriela is the fourth of her siblings to follow the political career, as well as her father Archduke Otto did for decades, being Member of the European Parliament for 20 years from 1979 and 1999 and president of the International Paneuropean Union from 1986 to 2004; her sister Walburga is a member of the Swedish Parliament, her brother Karl has been a member of the European Parliament, while the other brother Georg is the President of the Red Cross in Hungary.

To read more about Archduchess Gabriela, pleas visit this thread.

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