by Christos Zabounis
He was everyone’s cousin. Charles of England, Sophia of Spain, Margaret of Denmark, and even Grand Duchess Maria of Russia. He discreetly passed away on Sunday, July 28, filling with sadness his wife Marina Karella, his daughters Princesses Alexandra and Olga, the Greek royal family, of which he was a prominent member, his friends, but also the hundreds of thousands of his readers around the world. He was an unusual prince, in the sense that he decided to leave the military career for which King Paul intended him, and to deal with his great love, History. Orphaned at the age of just one year, he followed the family of his mother, Princess Francis of Orleans, into exile, first in Morocco, where his uncle, the Count of Paris, lived, and then in Spain. He returned to France after the end of the Second World War, and there he studied at the famous Institute of Political Sciences. He came to the country of his father, Prince Christophoros, son of George I, in the early 1960s, to fulfill his military obligations, like every Greek person. A sudden love affair was to drastically change the course of his life, after he made the brave decision to renounce his rights to the Throne, as envisaged at the time, for morganatic marriages. An interesting note about the differentiation that would characterize him for the rest of his life was the feast in a tavern in Paenia, with Zambeta as the protagonist, after the wedding reception in the Palace of Herodes Atticus. We met in 1990 in the French capital, where he had settled after an intense New York stint, and we connected spiritually. I was entrusted with part of the research for the book he was preparing, for “Boumboulina”, and then I undertook to find Greek publishers for his best-sellers, such as “Palace of Tears”, which sold more than 1,000,000 copies in France. I owe him eternal gratitude, because thanks to him I also became a publisher, but mainly because he introduced me to a world “heavy”, like History, but also “light”, like his elegance. He kept a daily diary, answered all letters personally, dedicated a lot of time and energy to the creation of the “Eliza” Foundation, protecting abused children, and in recent years he enjoyed family life with his children and grandchildren in Patmos. May he rest in peace.
PS. With relative delay, I had received, at the end of June, his last book, a beau livre that he had been planning for years, under the title “Crown, Art and Fantasy”. I’m glad he saw the bookreading of ‘Mancode’ and enjoyed it.
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