After Ertegun died in 2006 from injuries sustained in a fall backstage at a Rolling Stones concert in Manhattan, his wife continued the couple’s philanthropic activities. In 2015, his $9 million gift created an atrium for Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 2017, your $1.4 million pledge helped restore a substructure beneath the 4th-century Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, a site where, according to Christian traditions, the body of Christ was entombed. In recognition of that gift of hers, the patriarch of Jerusalem named her great commander of the Holy Sepulcher.
His gift of $41 million to humanities scholarships at Oxford University in 2012 was the largest of its kind in Oxford’s 900 years. In 2017, in recognition of her services to philanthropy, education, and British-American cultural relations, Queen Elizabeth II appointed her honorary commander of the Order of the British Empire.
“For Ahmet and me, one of the great joys of life has been the study of history, music, languages, literature, art and archaeology,” Mrs. Ertegun said at the time. “I think it is tremendously important to support those things that last over time and make the world a more human place.”
Mica Ertegun was born Ioana Maria Banu in Bucharest, Romania, on October 21, 1926, the only child of Natalia Gologan and Dr. Gheorghe Banu. Her father, who served in a cabinet of King Carol II in the 1930s, was close to King Michael I during World War II, when Romania was at times allied with Hitler. In the midst of Allied air raids, Mica, as her German nurse called her, was sent to her family’s farm.
In January 1948, after the king was forced to abdicate and her father was imprisoned by the new communist government, Mica and Stefan Grecianu, an aristocrat 15 years her senior and whom she had married when she was 16, were put in prison. a train that took the royal family into exile. Traveling on stateless refugee passports, the couple arrived penniless in Zurich.
Friends put them up for a year in the majestic Dolder Grand hotel, overlooking the Swiss Alps. Others paid their way to Paris, where Mica got modeling jobs to support herself. Later, more friends lent them money to move to Canada. They settled on a farm on the shores of Lake Ontario, where for eight years Mica helped collect, wash and package the eggs of 5,000 chickens.
