The Portuguese royal house gains a new member, and she comes with a surname that traces its way across half of Europe. Infante Dinis, Duke of Porto (born 1999 in Lisbon) got engaged to Countess Ana Schaffgotsch, born 2002 in Vienna. The engagement was announced on June 29, and the ring - with a prominent blue sapphire - inevitably recalls that of Princess Diana.

Ana is not just a title on paper. She holds degrees in economics and social sciences from Vienna, further training in real-estate management and healthcare, and is currently studying comparative education in London while volunteering at a Portuguese NGO. She speaks German, English and Italian. In other words - an educated woman building a biography herself, not just waiting for her relatives to write it.

And her relatives are a whole history book. The Schaffgotsch dynasty served the Habsburgs and the Prussian authorities in Silesia for centuries, amassing forests, palaces and spas. After the Second World War, when Silesia passed to Poland, the family lost much of its property - they were left with the Niederleis castle in Lower Austria, looted during the Soviet occupation and then restored after 1955. A familiar Balkan story in an Austrian edition: power that wars break, and families stubbornly recover piece by piece.

The wedding date is not yet known - it will be announced "when the time comes." The Portuguese royal house has had no throne since 1910, but it has something no revolution abolished - the ability to keep holding weddings as if time had stopped. The question is whether such dynastic unions still mean anything, or are just nicely packaged memories of a Europe that long ago lost its kings in power.