Friday, May 3, 2013

Archduke Franz Josef spends night in a homeless shelter

May 4, 1929

Archduke Franz Josef of Austria, described as "penniless and weary from tramping,"  arrived earlier today at an "asylum for shelterless tramps," at Stromberg, a small spa, near the river Mosel.

After the police found his papers to be in order, Franz Josef was allowed to travel to Trier.

Franz Josef, has been known as a "scholarly vagabond."  His current address is in Barcelona, where he moved two years ago to study the "customs of the Spanish gypsies."

The archduke, the ninth child of Archduke Leopold Salvator of Austria, a member of the Tuscan branch of the Habsburg family, and Infanta Blanca of Borbon, daughter of Carlos, Duke of Madrid, the Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne.  He was born in Vienna of February 4, 1905, and developed an a "penchant for ethnology" at a young age. 

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