Constantine II of Greece

Biography

Constantine was born in 1940 at Psychiko outside Athens, the only son of Crown Prince Paul and Crown Princess Frederica. The royal family spent the Second World War in exile in Egypt and South Africa and came home in 1946. When his father became king in 1947 he became crown prince. He boarded at the Anavryta school from 1950 to 1958, trained in all three branches of the armed forces and took law courses at the University of Athens. At the 1960 Rome Olympics he steered the Greek boat that won gold in the Dragon sailing class, and in 1963 he joined the International Olympic Committee.

After standing in as regent during his father's last illness, he became King of the Hellenes on 6 March 1964 and married Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark that September. In July 1965 a dispute with Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou over control of the defence ministry ended with Papandreou's resignation. The king then installed a series of governments built on defectors from Papandreou's Centre Union, a crisis known as the Iouliana that brought large anti-monarchist protests.

When army colonels seized power on 21 April 1967, Constantine swore in their government. On 13 December 1967 he tried to rally loyal units against the junta from Kavala, failed, and fled abroad. The junta abolished the monarchy on 1 June 1973, and a referendum confirmed the decision that July. After democracy returned, a second referendum in December 1974, in which he was not allowed to campaign in person, confirmed the republic with nearly 70 percent of the vote, and he accepted the result.

He lived mostly in London for the next four decades. Papers published later showed that he was drawn into plotting against the elected government between 1975 and 1978, and he spent years in legal disputes with the Greek state over the royal properties. He moved back to Athens in 2013 and died there in January 2023 after a stroke.