Royals “of Greece”
Former royal family wants citizenship back
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50 years after the abolition of the monarchy in Greece, members of the former royal family now want to apply for citizenship. This would also give the Royals a new nickname.
Fifty years after the abolition of the monarchy in Greece, members of the former Greek royal family have apparently applied for Greek citizenship and officially recognized the country's republican system of government. This is reported by the British newspaper “The Guardian”.
Former King Constantine II (1940-2023) and his family members have had their Greek citizenship revoked. The reason for this was a dispute over former royal property and the claim that he had refused to deny his descendants the right to the Greek throne.
According to the British daily, a representative of the Greek Interior Ministry said that the surviving relatives of the king, who died in 2023, signed a declaration on Thursday in which they recognized the republican government and adopted the new surname “De Grece” (“of Greece” in French). .
A name that doesn't actually exist
The official authorities did not announce which family members are specifically seeking Greek citizenship. According to Greek media reports, these are likely to be the five children of Constantine II and Anne-Marie of Denmark – Alexia, Pavlos, Nikolaos, Theodora and Philippos – as well as five grandchildren.
According to the newspaper, the decision on citizenship must now be published in the official gazette before identity documents can be applied for. Politicians from left-wing opposition parties criticized the choice of name because the Greek naming law does not contain the addition of “von”, but did not question the right to citizenship.
Constantine II was the last king of the Hellenes from 1964 to 1973. The monarchy was abolished in Greece by a referendum in December 1974, in which the people overwhelmingly voted for a republican constitution. The king then lived in exile for decades and received a Danish passport before Constantine returned to the country as a private citizen in 2013 and recognized the almost 40-year-old referendum.
In the course of a legal dispute over the former royal estate, which is now state property, the family members were stripped of their citizenship in 1994 and given the surname Glücksburg, as Konstantin comes from the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg on his father's side. However, the family refused to take the name and basically lived without a last name.
