Tomislav Karadjordjevic; Yugoslav Prince Returned Home After Exile

Prince Tomislav Karadjordjevic, 72, the brother of Yugoslavia’s last monarch who spent much of his life in exile during Communist rule but returned home in 1991. The Karadjordjevics were originally a Serbian dynasty that expanded its rule when the first Yugoslav state was formed after World War I. The soft-spoken prince, brother of King Peter, fled with his family from Nazi forces at the outset of World War II. When the Communists under President Josip Broz Tito took over after the war they abolished the monarchy, and the Karadjordjevic family remained in exile. Tomislav owned and ran a fruit farm in Sussex, England. He was next in line to the throne until the birth of Crown Prince Aleksandar. King Peter died in 1970 in Los Angeles. Although most of the surviving royal family has made occasional visits to Yugoslavia since the official end of Communism a decade ago, Tomislav was the only one who resettled there. He was active in a number of charities in England and later in Yugoslavia and shied away from politics and the turmoil that left Yugoslavia truncated and reduced to Serbia and Montenegro. On Wednesday after a long battle with cancer at the royal family’s ancestral home of Oplenac, 40 miles south of Belgrade.