Constantine II, last king of Greece, dies

Former King Constantine II of Greece, brother of Spanish Queen Sophia, died on Tuesday at the age of 82. According to El Mundo newspaper, Constantine II died at the private Igeia Hospital in Athens, where he had been hospitalized since last week.

El Mundo also reports that last week the honorary Queen Sofia traveled to Greece to accompany her brother Constantino in his final days. Last week, Constantine II was hospitalized after suffering a stroke while at home.

The former monarch was also previously hospitalized due to complications from Covid-19 and was described as “delicate” last week.

Konstantin the Greek was in intensive care

Constantine II was the last king of Greece, who ruled from 1964 to 1973, when the republic was proclaimed in the country, and, as El Pais recalls, his “life was marked by the loss of the throne and exile.” .

Born in Athens in 1940, Constantine was the son of King Paul I of Greece and belonged to the Royal House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, or House of Glücksburg, which arose in the 19th century and included the royal families in Denmark, Norway. and Greece (there was, for example, the Royal House, to which Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, belonged).

He ascended the throne in 1964 after the death of his father and married Princess Ana Maria of Denmark, a descendant of the same royal house.

His reign was marked by great political instability in Greece, especially due to the military coup of 1967, which established the regime in the country, later known as the dictatorship of the colonels. Constantine II took the oath of the elements of the military junta that came to power, which made him a collaborator of the dictatorship until the end of his life.

As early as 1967, King Constantine II sponsored a counter-coup to overthrow the military dictatorship, but the failure of the coup forced the king to seek exile in the United Kingdom.

In 1973, after several years abroad and without practical power, the king was overthrown by a military junta, but the following year the regime of the colonels finally collapsed. Constantine did return to Greece to try to restore his role as monarch and head of state, but the referendum showed that the majority of Greeks wanted a republic.

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Constantine then lived in exile, only occasionally returning to Greece, with the authorities of which he always maintained tense relations.

In 1994, the Greek government stripped Constantine of his Greek citizenship because they wanted to keep the name “Constantine the Greek” in his passport, and not “Constantine Glücksburg” as he should have been called under the rules of the Greek Republic, which forbid titles of nobility.

Konstantin until the end of his life lived only with Danish citizenship, although in 2013 he returned to live in Greece.