Sweden Celebrates The Wedding of Princess Victoria With Commoner Gym Owner
On Saturday, June 19, Sweden celebrated their first royal wedding since 1976, as Crown Princess Victoria married her longtime beau and former personal trainer, Daniel Westling. It is Europe’s biggest and most expensive royal wedding since that of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.
After eight years of relationship with stormy ups and downs, mixed with King’s total disapproval and her friends’ mocking of Westling’s rural accent and lack of royal manners, Princess Victoria Ingrid Alice Désirée of Sweden, the first in line to succeed her father, King Carl XVI Gustaf, married the man she loves. She walked down the aisle among more than 1,200 guests gathered in the Stockholm’s Storkyrkan (Big Cathedral), the same church in which the Crown Princess’s parents, King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia, were married exactly 34 years ago.
The ceremony was lavish and elegant and cost $2 million. The 32-year-old princess looked extraordinary in an ivory silk, short-sleeved, off-the-shoulder gown, designed by Par Engsheden. International royals were there to witness her saying “ja”. Prince Albert of Monaco and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, and his wife Sophie, the Countess, representing the British royal family, Queen Margrethe and Prince Consort Henrik of Denmark, Queen Sofia of Spain, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, Princess Martha Louise of Norway and her husband Ari Behn, Princess Laurentien and Prince Constantijn of Holland, Crown Princess Mary and Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and the glamorous Princess Madeleine of Sweden, who wore a lavish, electric blue gown, were all present in the cathedral.
Almost five million viewers watched the entire ceremony across Europe and on Stockholm’s streets, people could watch the ceremony on specially installed television screens.
The BBC reports that after completion of the wedding ceremony, at around 4:45 p.m., the couple took a horse drawn-carriage through the streets of Stockholm to the cheers of tens of thousands of people. The streets were awash with Swedish flags and 40,000 roses, carnations, lilies and hydrangeas decked the lamp-posts and shop fronts.
Then, the newlyweds stopped at the Vasa Museum from where they boarded the ‘Vasaorden’, an 18.6-meter long wooden boat with a gold plated saloon that was built in 1923 using Swedish oak. At around 5:35 p.m., the boat docked at the steps in the front of the castle.
The union of Princess Victoria and Olof Daniel Westling, now HRH Prince Daniel, Duke of Vastergotland, will be celebrated for several days with a private dinner at Drottningholm Palace, a lunch at the City Hall of Stockholm and a gala performance at the City’s Concert hall.
