Prague - Czech Foreign Affairs Minsiter Karel Schwarzenberg remarried his estranged wife, Countess Therese Hardegg, nearly twenty years after their separation.
According to the Austrian regional newspaper Kleine Zeitung, the ceremony took place in the small town of Murau in the south of Austria, where the couple once lived. No photos of the secretly arranged wedding were made available.
The ministry would not comment on the information. "The minister does not wish to speak about his private affairs," said the ministry's spokeswoman Zuzana Opletalová.
The Austrian paper was not able to obtain Schwarzenberg's comment either, but the minister's son Johannes confirmed the renewal of the vows between his parents had indeed taken place.
"I have often imagined it could happen," said the 40-year old Schwarzenberg, Jr. "Everything that makes the parents happy, pleases their son too," he quipped, adding that the two were never really estranged.
The couple originally married in 1967 in Seefeld, Austria. They had three children together before divorcing in 1988.
Mr. Schwarzenberg, whose full name is Karl Johannes Nepomuk Josef Norbert Friedrich Antonius Wratislaw Mena von Schwarzenberg, is a scion of the House of Schwarzenberg, an old aristocratic family with roots in Bohemia.
Despite his having spent a considerable time in Austria after the communist regime drove the family out of their native Czechoslovakia, he is not an Austrian citizen, holding only Czech and Swiss passports. He is 70 years old and his wife is two years his junior.
