HAPPILY NEVER AFTER

Newlyweds’ Honeymoon Destroyed by WWI Bomb Blast: Bride Injured, 2 Killed

Lidiia Makarchuk has been hospitalized after an explosion that killed her brother and friend in the Carpathian Mountains.

A honeymoon has gone up in smoke after an undetonated bomb dating back to World War I suddenly exploded, killing two and severely injuring the new bride. The bomb, thought to have been planted during the Brusilov offensive in 1916, tore through the party of 12 in Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains last month. Gathered around a bonfire, the group was celebrating a belated honeymoon for accountant Lidiia Makarchuk, 31, and Norbert Varga, a radio operator. Although the pair are Ukrainian and Hungarian, respectively, they share a home in the U.K. and had traveled to Central Europe for the occasion.

Varga had left the bonfire briefly to retrieve his camera when he felt the bomb go off. “I ran to the bonfire as fast as I could, screaming Lidiia’s name,” he said. Makarchuk was badly injured, with shrapnel having ripped through her legs, hands, and left eye. Makarchuk’s brother, Myroslav, 29, and another man died during the ensuing hour and a half it took medical personnel to get to the scene. “My one regret is not calling out to him to tell him I loved him,” Markarchuk told the Daily Mail from the hospital, where she is recovering. Her family plans to move her to a Hungarian eye clinic for further treatment next month.