He was born on 17 January 1895 in
Sofia as the second son of
Ferdinand I of Bulgaria and his first wife,
Marie Louise of Bourbon-Parma. During the First World War, Kiril was considered as a candidate for the
restored Polish crown in 1917, as well as the throne of Albania. In September 1936, Prince Kiril accompanied
King Edward VIII on a whistle-stop tour of Bulgaria. Present at the death of his brother, Tsar Boris, on 28 August 1943, Prince Kiril was appointed head of a
regency council by the Bulgarian
parliament, to act as
Head of State until the late Tsar's son,
Simeon II of Bulgaria, became 18. Prince Kiril, with the widowed Tsaritsa,
Giovanna of Savoy, daughter of the Italian king, led the state funeral for his brother
Tsar Boris III on 5 September 1943 at the
Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia, thereafter proceeding across the city to the main railway station where the funeral train waited to take the body to the 12th-century
Rila Monastery in the mountains. Thereafter, three consecutive governments made efforts to extricate themselves from Bulgaria's agreements with
Germany, notably one that permitted their use of the railway to
Greece and the deployment of German troops to safeguard it against sabotage. A Bulgarian delegation travelled to
Cairo in an attempt to negotiate with the United States and the United Kingdom but failed, as the latter refused to meet the delegation without the participation of the
Soviet Union. Despite Sofia's continuous diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, on 5 September 1944, that country declared war on Bulgaria, and on 8 September Soviet armies crossed the
Romanian border and the
Danube. The
Fatherland Front, a coalition of the
Communist Party, the left wing of the
Agrarian Union, the
Zveno group, and a few pro-Soviet politicians who had returned from exile in the Soviet Union, executed a
Soviet-backed
military coup on 9 September and seized power. In late January 1945 Prince Kiril was sentenced to death by the
People's Court. On the night of February 1, 1945 he was executed at
Sofia Central Cemetery along with former Prime Minister and Regent Professor
Bogdan Filov, Regent General
Nikola Mihov, and a range of former cabinet ministers, royal advisors and 67 MPs. On August 26, 1996, the
Supreme Court overturned the sentences of February 1, 1945, which had sentenced the three regents, ministers, and councilors to death. ==Honours and arms==