Galina
Komarow, daughter of Captain Constantine Martemianoff and Zinaida Klugloff,
was born, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1918, the same year that Tsar Nicholas
Romanov and his entire family were brutally executed by Bolshevik revolutionaries.
The next year, Galina and her parents escaped Bolshevik-led persecution,
fleeing to Europe. For the next 20 years, they were European sojourners,
traveling through Poland, Germany, France, and Austria, as displaced persons,
surviving the ravages of depression and war. Eventually migrating across
the Atlantic aboard the TSS Nea Hellas, the family arrived, Pier 21, Halifax,
July 1949. First settling, Ajax, Ontario, then Toronto, Galina quickly
established a HairDressing Salon on Gerrard Street in Toronto’s east end.
Because Galina’s parents had loyally served the Romanovs before the fall
of Tsarist Russia, a sister of Tsar Nicholas II, Olga, chose to finish
out her last days with loyal friends in the flat above Galina’s Gerrard
Street Salon. Galina carried on her hair dressing business for many years
after the death of “the last Duchess,” retiring shortly after her own mother
passed away, 1989. In this view, circa 1955, Galina Komarow, right, visits
with Her Imperial Highness, the Last Grand Duchess of Russia, who, in exile,
resided, Cooksville, Ontario, throughout the 1950s. [Photo, courtesy Galina
Komarow]