Why Is the King of Greece Living as a Commoner?

As his country faces collapse, the former monarch makes a dramatic choice.

Once upon a time, in a kingdom by the sea, a handsome 24-year-old king married a beautiful 18-year-old princess, and the people of the kingdom rejoiced, and the king and queen lived in a golden palace in the capital, surrounded by royal gardens.

The king in this fairy tale was Constantine II of Greece. His teenage bride was Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark. But in 1967, three years after their wedding, after a coup and a failed countercoup, the young couple and their two small children were driven out of Greece, making a harrowing escape that forced the family into more than four decades of exile. In 1974, while Constantine was living in England and forbidden to speak on his own behalf, the king's subjects abolished the monarchy and stripped the royal family of its palaces, titles, property, and passports.

Now, almost 50 years after he left Greece, at a moment when the eyes of the world regard the country with pity and sorrow, when wealthy Greeks have long since stashed their money in other countries, and when young Greeks are desperately seeking ways to go anywhere else to find work, Constantine, no longer young, has chosen to move back to his native land, investing heavily in a new home for his remaining years and living as a commoner.

It's not as if his life of exile gave him no pleasure. Constantine has thrived for decades at the pinnacle of international society,socializing with Europe's royals (most of them his relatives). In 1986, to celebrate Queen Anne-Marie's 40th birthday, Constantine took over Claridge's Hotel in London for a ball attended by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip (Constantine's cousin), along with Prince Charles and Princess Diana, King Juan Carlos of Spain and his wife Queen Sofía (Constantine's sister), Queen Margrethe of Denmark (his sister-in-law), and virtually all the other royals of Europe. The glittering crowd danced to Lester Lanin's orchestra until dawn, when breakfast was served.

When Constantine turned 60, in 2000, Prince Charles hosted a gala at his country home, Highgrove. It was on that occasion that Queen Elizabeth and Camilla Parker Bowles retired to a convenient room for their first private conversation.

So the question must be asked: Why, at the moment of his country's greatest economic turmoil, would Constantine elect to return to a commoner's existence in Greece, the country that took away his crown, and even his citizenship?

"It's a mystery to us," said Dino Anagnostopoulos, the king's lifelong friend and former classmate. "I don't understand how a man who knows everybody who is anybody in this world would choose to go back to Greece—and especially now, when the country is going through such hard times."

"Why" has become the central mystery of Constantine's life. In person he comes across as a regular guy. He speaks fluent English with a bit of a British accent, and he enjoys hearing and telling a good joke, even at his own expense. Yet despite his chatty bonhomie, it is difficult to pin down the reason for the 75-year-old ex-king's decision to return to his place of birth. In fact, it took three long interviews— two in Athens, one in London—before he would address the topic.

David Lees / Life Picture Collection / Getty

One would certainly understand if he never wanted to return, given the often traumatic events of his young life, beginning with his family's escape from Greece just ahead of the invading Germans when he was a year old. The family settled in Cairo, where the infant prince nearly died after an intentional misdiagnosis by a doctor who was a communist agent (a second doctor diagnosed acute appendicitis and recommended a timely surgery). A year after his family returned to Greece, when he was six, he became the crown prince after his childless uncle, King George II, died and his father assumed the throne as King Paul.

The prince's parents created a rigorous boarding school, Anavryta, for his education and handpicked 14 boys to be his classmates. They became his closest friends for life. On weekends, away from the spartan school's regime of cold showers and 6 a.m. runs, the young prince would invite friends to the summer palace of Tatoi, north of Athens, where his parents held opulent balls and well-born Greek maidens dreamed of catching the eye of the handsome prince. It was not to be. At 19, on a state visit to Denmark, he fell hard for Princess Anne-Marie, youngest daughter of King Frederick IX of Denmark and sister of the current queen, Margrethe II. She was just 13. On their second meeting, in 1961, when she was 15 and he was 21, he announced to his parents that he was going to marry Anne-Marie. "I didn't ask or suggest. I talked about it as a fait accompli," he recalled.

Convincing Anne-Marie's father was more difficult. When he asked Frederick IX for permission to marry his daughter, the king locked Constantine in a nearby bathroom. When Frederick told his wife, Queen Ingrid, of the proposal, she suggested he release Constantine and open a bottle of champagne.

Constantine was no slouch. He was a dashing young Olympic medalist, having won gold in sailing at the Rome summer games in 1960—the first gold medal for Greece since 1912. "It is the most wonderful feeling I've ever had, other than getting engaged to my wife," he said.

In March 1964, King Paul died of cancer, making his 23-year-old son King Constantine II. The new king and Anne-Marie married six months later, in Athens—two weeks after the bride's 18th birthday. "I was the first king ever to marry in Greece," he said with a smile. "And last year we were fortunate to celebrate our 50th anniversary—back in Athens, at the former Royal Yacht Club in Piraeus."

Less than three years after Constantine became king, a group of right-wing midlevel army officers led by Colonel George Papadopoulos staged a coup d'état, on April 21, 1967, surrounding the palace at Tatoi with tanks. Many Greeks would suffer under Papadopoulos's dictatorship. "That night the colonels arrested somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 people, including all my staff, in under two hours," Constantine told me. "I had to think of all the blood that would be shed if I openly opposed them."

A month after the coup, the king met a group of his old classmates. According to Anagnostopoulos, when they berated Constantine for recognizing the regime, he told them, "Don't worry, in six months everything will be straightened out."

Associated Press

On December 13, 1967, before dawn, the king launched a countercoup, flying with his pregnant wife, their two-year-old  daughter, Alexia, seven-month old Crown Prince Pavlos, Constantine's mother Queen Frederica, and his sister Princess Irene to Kavala, a city in northern Greece—a place where he believed the army and its generals were loyal to him. He intended to create an alternative government in Thessaloniki, the second-largest city in Greece.

The air force and navy immediately declared for the king and mobilized, but the colonels in Athens put together a force that advanced north, and within hours it was clear the countercoup had failed. "I understood afterward, when you start something like this, it has to work in the first hour, two hours maximum, or it's a waste of time," Constantine said. "You would have to enforce it with a lot of bloodshed. The Greeks had been through a terrible civil war, and I wasn't going to put them through that again."

That night, to avoid open conflict, Constantine flew his family out of the country, toward Italy; he piloted the plane himself. "We had less than three minutes of fuel when we touched down," he said. "I had to borrow $300 from my valet to refuel the plane, and my brother-in-law [King Juan Carlos] had to send me clothes."

On the heels of these agonizing events, Queen Anne-Marie suffered a miscarriage. "It was a very dark period in our history," Constantine said, with obvious emotion. "A lot of officers who supported me were badly treated by the colonels when we failed. But at least we all made a major effort to free our country from that dictatorship."

From Rome, Constantine declared, "I am sure I shall go back the way my ancestors did." (Both his grandfather King Constantine I and his uncle King George II spent large portions of their reigns in exile during the world wars, which caused George II to remark, "The most important tool for a king of Greece is a suitcase.") Constantine and his family lived for two months in the Greek embassy in Rome and then for five years in a house in a suburb.

Over the next year the junta sent feelers to the king, trying to negotiate terms under which he would return, but he insisted on the restoration of democracy. He believes the colonels also engineered two attempts on his life.

"The second time," he said, "I was going to Tehran to meet the shah. When I got to Heathrow, I noticed that the flight was quite long, with two stops, so I changed to a direct flight on British Airways. When I got to Tehran the shah told me there had been an assassin on the Frankfurt leg of the original flight, but his people had intercepted him. 'So what happened to the fellow?' I  asked. 'Do you really want to know?' he said."

Thanassis Stavrakis / AP Photo

In 1973 the colonels in the junta were themselves replaced by younger officers, and when the new leaders tried to stage a coup in Cyprus in the summer of 1974, it prompted an invasion of the island by Turkey, and military rule in Greece collapsed.

As the dictatorship was crumbling, the veteran political leader Constantine Karamanlis, in self-exile in Paris, was in constant phone contact with the exiled king in London. "We had been talking throughout the day," Constantine said, "and that afternoon Karamanlis said he had been asked to go back to Athens. I said, 'By whom?' He said by people representing the junta. I said, 'Shall I come with you?' He said, 'No, let me go and see what is happening and I'll call you in the morning.'

"Of course," Constantine said, "the call never came."

Karamanlis formed a party, New Democracy, which won a resounding victory in November 1974, and then Constantine's former ally called for a referendum on the monarchy for December 8. The king was not allowed to go to Greece to campaign or to speak to the people on TV, and when the results were announced, only 31 percent of the population had voted for the king's restoration.

Having lost any hope for a return of the monarchy, the deposed king settled down in London, where he had moved in 1973. He opened an office in Mayfair and maintained contact with his supporters, who included wealthy Greek ship owners based in Britain.

In 1980, Constantine and Anne-Marie created the Hellenic College of London, where their own children were educated in both English and Greek. (After the escape from Greece and the miscarriage, Anne-Marie gave birth in Rome to Prince Nikolaos, in 1969, and then, in London, to Princess Theodora, in 1983, and Prince Philippos, in 1986.)

A devastating moment in Constantine's long exile occurred in February 1981, when his mother died, at the age of 63, in Madrid of heart failure during eyelid surgery. The Greek government announced that it would allow the former king and his family to return for only a few hours to bury her in the family cemetery at Tatoi, where Constantine and his sisters had spent idyllic summers as children.

Constantine began negotiations in 1986 with the government of Andreas Papandreou to receive a financial settlement for seized property that had belonged to the king: the 10,000-acre Tatoi estate, the royal estate of Mon Repos, on Corfu (birthplace of many royals, including Prince Philip; it is now a public park and museum), and 7,500 acres of timberland in central Greece. Two years later "we reached an agreement that Papandreou was supposed to sign on a Thursday," Constantine said. "But that Wednesday he collapsed from a heart problem and was rushed to a hospital in England. Our agreement was never signed."

Thanassis Stavrakis / AP Photo

When Papandreou lost the election the following year, negotiations continued with the new government, and a tentative agreement was reached. But when Papandreou returned to power in 1993, he revoked that agreement. According to Costas Strongylos, a longtime friend of Constantine's and his private secretary since 1999, "Under the new law, enacted in 1994, all of the king's property was confiscated by the Greek state. The law further stated that in order for the king and his family to hold Greek passports, they had to accept the referendum abolishing the monarchy and select an ordinary last name like those used by all other Greek citizens."

The king then sued in the European Court of Human Rights, which set aside the name issue and asked for valuations of the king's properties. The government's appraisers put the value at $550 million, according to Strongylos; the king's put it at $500 million. The courts handed the case to a commission of three, which decided that the former royal family would not receive either estimate; the king would have to settle for 12 mil- lion euros, and his sister Irene for 900,000 euros.

The Greek government waited until the last day permitted by the ruling, then paid the king out of the country's natural disasters fund, in order to make it look as if Constantine were depleting his country's emergency resources. He countered by putting the money into the Anna-Maria Foundation, to allocate the funds back to the Greek people for use in "extraordinary natural disasters and charitable causes."

Constantine insists that he long ago accepted the rejection of the monarchy. "If the Greek people decide that they want a republic, they are entitled to have that and should be left in peace to enjoy it," he told Time in 2002. What was impossible to accept was the enforced exile. To keep Constantine and his family out of Greece, in the early 1980s the government sent an order to all consulates to deny any requests by members of the former royal family to have their passports renewed, effectively rendering them stateless persons. For a time they traveled on passports issued by the Spanish government, which listed the king's name as "Constantino de Grecia." Now he and his wife travel with Danish passports, which identify them as "H.M. King Constantine" and "H.M. Queen Anne-Marie."

The first time they ventured back to Greece after burying Queen Frederica was in 1993, when they flew into Thessaloniki, boarded a friend's yacht, and sailed down the Aegean to the wealthy Porto Heli area. Constantine remembered being "followed all the way by navy vessels, as if we were an invading force."

As the 2004 summer Olympics in Athens approached, everyone knew that the ex-king would be coming to Greece as an honorary member of the International Olympic Committee. "Ever since they created the republic through the referendum in 1974, I decided to stay away and not interfere," he said. "But as time passed, I had the feeling that they were going to use my presence at the Olympic Games to say that I was trying to come back as king. I wasn't going to have any of that. So I came back to Greece in 2003—the year before the Olympics. Everyone was taken by surprise."

When Constantine and Anne-Marie landed in Athens, "it was clear nobody realized we were on the plane. We showed the passports and suddenly they said, 'The king is in the VIP lounge!' and there was all kinds of commotion. Then I called the Greek ambassador back in London and said, 'Tell the government the king is back in Greece, and here is my itinerary. I'm going to Tatoi to have a memorial service for my parents, and then I'm going to the Pentelikon Hotel to spend the night. I will leave the next morning.' I came to show them I could come when I wanted to come, not when someone told me I could."

David Lees / Corbis

After the first surprise visit, the king and his family came back more often, without the excitement. But his arrival in Greece as a representative of the Olympics in the summer of 2004 was filled with irony and drew unexpected support from all points on the political spectrum. "As I approached the president, every pair of eyes were on us," Constantine remembered. "I said to the poor man, 'Mr. President, do you do rousfetia [favors]?' And he said, 'What's on your mind?' I said, 'I want you to invite my family to the palace, to see all the changes.' "

" 'Of course!' he replied. 'Just tell your secretary and mine to agree on the date.' "

That visit to what had once been the royal palace in Athens, now the presidential palace, occurred on December 24, 2004. "It was horrible!" Constantine exclaimed. "All the former bedrooms don't exist. Gone! Everything else—every room—is an office. I asked him, 'How many people work here?' He told me 120. I had 13.

"Today the president has a huge amount of security, and according to the constitution the president is paid a salary and it's his money," Constantine continued. "Now the running of the presidential palace is paid for with the taxpayers' money. So are the president's telephones, heating, cars, drivers, clothes, state visits—all paid for by the state. For us it was the complete opposite. We were paid X amount—I think it was 7 million drachmas— and I paid for my own education with an inheritance, because my father was running out of money. Part of the excuse against me was that royalty costs too much. But royalty costs so much less! Today we have, I don't know, three or four former heads of state. All of them have pensions, and so do all their police, security, drivers, and secretaries."

Through all the vicissitudes Constantine has endured over the years, the one foundation that has provided him with a sense of security is the friendship of the 14 men who, years ago, were chosen to be his fourth-grade classmates in the newly created Anavryta School. The boys had been selected through tests of their intelligence and chosen to represent all classes of Greek society. They had only alternate weekends free to go home, and if their parents could not afford the boarding fees, they were given full scholarships.

"The Anavryta School was set up in Kifissia by King Paul so that Constantine would be educated with smart Greek boys from different backgrounds," said Panayiotis Soucacos, who was one of those 14 boys and is now a professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Athens Medical School. "It was established on the principles of German educator Kurt Hahn, who founded the Gordonstoun School in Scotland, where British royals have gone, including Prince Philip and Prince Charles. Of the 14 in the first class, 13 are still alive. All did well. Five became university professors, four in medicine [including Anagnostopoulos, a clinical professor of surgery at the Columbia University Medical Center, in New York] and one in nuclear physics. The others became successful businessmen."

Tales of Constantine's loyalty and kindness to his former classmates abound. "Constantine was not only best man at my wedding and my daughter's, he baptized two of my granddaughters, too," said Anagnostopoulos, who feels that his friend's decision to return to Greece ultimately has to do with "wanting to end his life where he began it. Constantine is happiest when he's there."

"He's homesick—down-to-the-bone homesick," said Soucacos. "Besides his family, and standing up to the junta, he's proudest of winning an Olympic gold medal for Greece. He has never thought of any other place as home."

Back in 2002, Constantine told Larry King that the only good thing about living in exile was that he had "much more time to see my children grow up." But the children have done that and gone. His youngest son, Philippos, 29, works in finance in New York, and his youngest daughter, Theodora, 31, is an actress in Hollywood (as Theodora Greece). Nikolaos, 45, is married to Tatiana Blatnik and lives in Kastri, Greece, in an apartment owned by the daughter of the king's late nemesis, Papandreou. Eldest son Pavlos, 48, married Marie-Chantal Miller, whose billionaire father, Robert Warren Miller, developed duty-free shops at airports; they live with their five children in London. The eldest, Alexia, 50, is married to an architect, Carlos Morales Quintana, and they live with their four children in Spain. "My eldest grandchild turned 16 yesterday," Constantine said. "He's a diver. He's everything: a rower, a diver, a scholar. We are very lucky with our grandchildren."

Seven years ago, at the age of 68, Constantine underwent heart surgery in London—a reminder of his mortality that undoubtedly fueled his desire to move home full-time. When he's in Greece he lives in Porto Heli, the seaside town he visited years ago followed by the Greek navy. According to Costas Strongylos, Constantine financed the purchase of the house by "selling his London properties for a good profit. He also made money in business deals in the Middle East."

The result is a lavish if less than royal life that does feature his other great love: the sea. "He can sail his caïque any time he wants, and he does almost every afternoon," Strongylos said. "He takes her out from three to seven, finds a quiet cove, and anchors there to swim and relax."

John Kolesidis / Reuters / Corbis

Near the end of our interviews, Constantine finally offered his reasons for returning. We were sitting in the Byzantino Restaurant at the Athens Hilton with Nikolaos. "Look a t ancient Greek history," he said. "All Greeks who live in exile, they want to go back. It's in the blood. Funnily enough, the one pushing hardest was my wife. I think she realized I would be happy only when I came back home."

But why, when so many others have chosen to flee, has he gone in the other direction and thrown in his lot—and his own still considerable resources—with the country that revoked his birth- right? Why return to his homeland when it has been reduced to economic chaos?

In a way, his reasons for returning reflect his attitude about the future of his troubled country. History presents ample evidence of the resiliency of the Greeks. "They have seen their standard of living drop by 30 percent and unemployment soar to more than 25 percent," he said. "It's painful to see how much suffering they have endured. But the Greeks are a tough people who not only know how to enjoy life but how to endure hardship. We suffered centuries of subjugation under the Ottoman Turks, a brutal Nazi occupation, and a devastating civil war, but we bounced back to create a beautiful land to call home. Everyone must take great care not to allow our glorious country to fall into the kind of national division that brought so much misery in the past. I have faith that Greeks will face our current troubles with patience and resolve and that we will prevail."

During our conversation Constantine confided that he has already decided where he will be buried: the royal cemetery on the grounds of Tatoi. "My family doesn't like it when I talk about it, but I've chosen the spot...that part where the graves are shad- owed by blossoming hickory trees, farther down and a little to the left of my father. Facing toward the sea..."

It's an appropriate place to spend eternity—overlooking what has drawn Greeks homeward since Odysseus made his way back to Ithaka. Like Homer's legendary hero, the former king has returned with no title to find a palace crumbling into ruins, but he considers himself fortunate to be back on his native ground, in life and in death. As the poet C.P. Cavafy wrote about Odysseus's long search for home:

Arriving there is what you are 

destined for

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't

have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become,

so full of experience,

You will have understood by then

what these Ithakas mean.

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