Boris Skosirev is a Belarusian adventurer who briefly became the king of Andorra in 1934. In 1984, the Catalan writer Anthony Morel y Mora wrote Boris I, King of Andorra, which describes in detail the Andorran period in the life of an adventurer.
Boris was born on June 12, 1896 in Vilnius. The son of retired cornet Mikhail Mikhailovich Skosirev and Countess Elizaveta Dmitrievna Mavras, who belonged to the small Belarusian gentry. He spent his childhood in an estate outside the city of Lida. From a young age, he showed outstanding ability to languages, so he spoke fluently in English, French and German. According to Skosirev himself, he studied at Oxford University, as well as at the Paris Lyceum of Louis the Great, although not a single official document that would confirm the veracity of the information has been identified. During World War I, he was on the Russian front as part of the British armored battalion, where he worked as a military translator under the command of Officer Oliver Locker-Lempson.
Emigration
According to Boris Skosirev himself, during the civil war he had to fight on the territory of southern Ukraine. He also claimed that in 1917 he was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks with his father and three uncles, but, unlike his relatives, he managed to escape and emigrate to London. In January 1919, Skosirev was detained by the local police and accused of fraudulent checks, after which a trial took place, which obliged him to pay all losses. His name is also involved in the theft of a gold watch from the Japanese attaché Major Hashimota. There are also suggestions that Skosirev at this time collaborated with the special services of different countries. In 1922, Skosirev moved to the Netherlands, and already in 1923 he received Dutch citizenship and a passport, which was issued to him by the Dutch consulate in France.
On March 21, 1931, Skosirev married a Frenchwoman, Marie-Louise, Para where Gasier, but the next year he started a short-term affair with an Englishwoman according to Phyllis Gerd in Spain. In the same 1932 he met Florence Marmont, the ex-wife of Howard S. Marmont, owner of the Marmon MotorCar Company. He lived with her in the city of Palma de Mallorca, introducing himself as a professor of English and physical education.
Andorran period
On May 17, 1934, Skosirev visited Andorra and declared his rights to the throne of the king, relying on the title of Count of Orange, which the Queen of the Netherlands allegedly granted him. Despite the fact that on May 22 he was expelled from the country, on July 6-7 he returned again and proposed to the General Council a program of reforms and modernization of Andorra. On July 8-10, the General Assembly proclaimed Skosirev the monarch of Andorra, Boris I, whose reign lasted until July 20, 1934. In this short period of time, a new constitution was approved, a new government appointed and the country's flag changed.
On July 20, Skosirev was detained by the Catalan police, who soon took him to Madrid. On October 31, 1934, a Spanish court imprisoned Skosirev for one year for illegal border crossing, but in November 1934 Skosirev was exiled to Portugal.
Further destiny
At the end of 1935, Skosirev moved to France, to the city of Saint-Cannes, where his official wife lived. On February 9, 1939, he was arrested by the French police and sent to the Le Vernet camp in the French Pyrenees, where "unwanted foreigners" were imprisoned, from where he was liberated by the Wehrmacht in 1942.
According to the memoirs of Boris Skosirev, after the war he was exiled to Siberia, but later fled to West Germany. In 1969, Skosirev parted with Marie-Louise Pará and married a German woman. He died on February 27, 1989 in the city of Boppard.
