Royalty - HM Silvia, Queen of Sweden - postcard c.1979

Postcard
• Picture / Image:  HM Silvia, the Queen of Sweden
• Publisher:  Ultraforlaget AB, Stockholm
• Postally used:  no
• Stamp:  n/a
• Postmark(s):  n/a
• Sent to:  n/a
• Notes / condition:  small surface mark on right

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Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information (internal links may not  work) :

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Queen Silvia of Sweden (née Silvia Renate Sommerlath; born 23 December 1943 in Heidelberg) is the spouse of King Carl XVI Gustaf and mother of the heir apparent to the throne, Crown Princess Victoria. Since 2011 Queen Silvia has been the longest serving Queen consort of Sweden, a record previous held by her thrice-over predecessor Queen Sophia, consort of King Oscar II.

Queen Silvia was born in Heidelberg, Germany, on 23 December 1943.^[1]

She is the daughter of the late Walther Sommerlath and his Brazilian wife Alice, née Soares de Toledo, also deceased.

The Queen has two older brothers: Ralf and Walther Sommerlath. They and their families were guests at the 2010 wedding of Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, and Daniel Westling.^[2] Her third brother, Jörg Sommerlath, died in 2006. The Mother-Child House Jörg Sommerlath in Berlin, operated by Queen Silvia's World Childhood Foundation,^[3] is named after him.

The Sommerlath family lived in São Paulo, Brazil, between 1947 and 1957, where the Queen attended the traditional German school Colégio Visconde de Porto Seguro and Walther Sommerlath held various positions, including President of the Brazilian subsidiary of Swedish company Uddeholm. The family returned to West Germany in 1957.

Before her marriage to the King of Sweden, Silvia Sommerlath worked at the Argentine Consulate in Munich, was an educational host during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, and served as the Deputy Head of Protocol for the Winter Games in Innsbruck in Austria. She also was briefly a flight attendant.

She is a trained interpreter and speaks six languages: Swedish, her native languages German and Portuguese, as well as French, Spanish, and English. She has some fluency in Swedish Sign Language, a national sign language used by the deaf community in Sweden.^[4]

During the 1972 Summer Olympics, Silvia Sommerlath met Crown Prince Carl Gustaf. In a later interview, the King explained how it just ""clicked"" when they met.

After the death of King Gustaf VI Adolf on 15 September 1973, Carl XVI Gustaf succeeded to the throne.

He and Silvia announced their engagement on 12 March 1976 and were married three months later, on 19 June in Stockholm Cathedral (""Storkyrkan Cathedral"") in Stockholm. It was the first marriage of a reigning Swedish monarch since 1797. If he had married Silvia during the reign of his grandfather, King Gustaf VI Adolf, he would have lost his position as heir-apparent to the Swedish throne. This was due to the inflexibility of his grandfather, who believed that royalty must marry royalty. This was also the reason why Carl Gustaf's uncle, Prince Bertil, did not marry until after Gustaf VI Adolf's death. (Bertil was second-in-line to the throne until his nephew produced an heir, and was therefore unable to marry the Welsh commoner, Princess Lilian, with whom he had been in love for decades, until 1976.)

In celebration of the forthcoming wedding of the King and the soon-to-be-Queen, Silvia, the internationally famous pop group ABBA performed the song Dancing Queen on Swedish television the night before the ceremony, although the song was not actually written for Queen Silvia.

The King and Queen of Sweden have three children.

• Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Victoria Ingrid Alice Désirée, Duchess of Västergötland, born on 14 July 1977. She was married on 19 June 2010 to Daniel Westling, who was born on 15 September 1973 (the same day that Carl Gustaf ascended to the Swedish throne). The wedding took place on her parents' 34th wedding anniversary.
• His Royal Highness Prince Carl Philip Edmund Bertil, Duke of Värmland, born on 13 May 1979.
• Her Royal Highness Princess Madeleine Thérèse Amelie Josephine, Duchess of Hälsingland and Gästrikland, born on 10 June 1982. She was married on 8 June 2013 to Christopher O'Neill, who was born on 27 June 1974. The ceremony was held at the Royal Palace chapel in Stockholm.

Though initially cool to the idea of a commoner queen, the Swedish press quickly warmed to Queen Silvia and soon began publishing admiring articles about how easily she fit into the country's expectations of queenly deportment. As the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet noted in 1994, on the occasion of the Queen's 50th birthday, she had revived the popularity of the monarchy. ""With Silvia, the republic died. You could put it that way. Even if Silvia's arrival was like kicking someone lying down. Or hitting a guy with glasses. The guy with glasses was mostly to be found with the Social Democrats. A few lines in the party manifesto, ever more vague over the years. It has always been there, but nobody has ever done anything to implement it.""^{[citation needed]}

In 2003, Queen Silvia told a Swedish reporter that she and the royal family would like to be more open to contact with magazines and newspapers but that false articles about the family's lives – including photograph montages purported to show the Crown Princess and Princess Madeleine with their ""secret"" babies, published in the German magazine ""Frau mit Herz"" – had made them wary. As she told the Swedish news agency TT, ""If a person is hurt too much, the natural reaction is to withdraw. That is a pity, because I really think our children are very natural and open toward other people and toward journalists.""

type=printed postcards

theme=royalty

county/ country=sweden

number of items=single

period=1945 - present

postage condition=unposted