Princess Cecilie of Greece and Denmark

Princess Cecilie of Greece and Denmark was born on June 22, 1911, in Athens, Greece. She was the daughter of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg. Princess Cecilie was a member of the Greek royal family and the Danish royal family. She was known for her marriage to Georg Donatus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse. Tragically, Princess Cecilie and her family were killed in an airplane crash on November 16, 1937, near Ostend, Belgium. The cause of the crash was bad weather conditions. Princess Cecilie was only 26 years old at the time of her death. Princess Cecilie is buried in Darmstadt, Germany, alongside her husband and two of their children. She left behind a legacy of being a beloved member of the Greek and Danish royal families.The third daughter of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Cecilie was born at Tatoi Palace, near Athens, on 22 June 1911.[1][2] Baptized on 10 July, her godparents were King George V of the United Kingdom, Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark and Grand Duchess Vera Konstantinovna of Russia.[2] Cecilie spent a happy childhood[3] within a united household[4] that was already made up of two daughters, Margarita (1905–1981)[5] and Theodora (1906–1969),[6] and was further expanded with the arrival of Sophie (1914–2001).[7] The favorite child of her father,[1][8] she grew up in Athens, Tatoi and Corfu,[9] where her father inherited Mon Repos after King George I's assassination in 1913.[10][11] Coming from a cosmopolitan dynasty, Cecilie and her sisters communicated in English with their mother, but they also used French, German, and Greek with their relatives and their governesses.[12] The girls also traveled abroad with their family at a very young age. In 1911 and 1913, Cecilie thus went to the United Kingdom and Germany, where she was introduced to her mother's relatives.[13] Cecilie's early years were marked by the instability that the Kingdom of Greece experienced at the start of the twentieth century.[14] Between 1912 and 1913, Greece engaged in the Balkan Wars, during which Prince Andrew served under Crown Prince Constantine while Princess Alice worked as a nurse for wounded soldiers.[15][16] They were, however, especially affected by the First World War, which created division between different branches of their family[17] as Greece set aside its neutrality due to the Triple Entente.[18] Cecilie and her sisters were in the royal palace of Athens when it was bombarded by the French Navy during the battle in the capital on 1 December 1916. In June 1917, King Constantine I was finally deposed and driven out of Greece by the Allies, who replaced him on the throne by his second son, the young Alexander.[20][21] Fifteen days later, Cecilie's family was in turn forced into exile in order to remove the possibility of the new monarch being influenced by those close to him.[22][23] Forced to reside in German-speaking Switzerland, the small group first stayed in a hotel in St. Moritz,[24][25] before settling in Lucerne,[26] where they lived with uncertainty about their future.[27] Exile was not the only source of concern for the family, however.[27] Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, some of Cecilie's Romanov relatives were murdered in Russia.[28][29] Shortly after these events, the Grand Ducal family of Hesse, to which Cecilie was closely related through her mother, was overthrown along with all the other German dynasties during the winter of 1918–1919.[30] Finally, the family went through some health problems, with Cecilie contracting the flu and scarlet fever in 1920.[31] At the beginning of 1919, Cecilie reunited with her paternal grandmother, the Dowager Queen Olga, spared by the Bolsheviks thanks to the diplomatic intervention of the Danes.[32][33] In the months that followed, Cecilie attended a family reunion with her maternal grandparents, and met her aunt Louise[34] and uncle Louis Mountbatten.[35] For Cecilie, who now formed a duo with her younger sister Sophie,[35] exile was not only synonymous with sadness; it was also an opportunity for long family reunions and walks in the mountains. On 2 October 1920, King Alexander, cousin of Cecilie, was bitten by a domestic monkey during a walk in Tatoi. Poorly cared for, he contracted sepsis, which prevailed on 25 October, without any member of his family being allowed to come to his bedside.[37][38] The death of the sovereign caused a violent institutional crisis in Greece. Already stuck, since 1919, in a new war against Turkey, Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos lost the 1920 Greek legislative election. Humiliated, he retired abroad while a referendum reinstalled Constantine I on the throne.[39] Mon Repos, Corfu (2012) Prince Andrew was received triumphantly in Athens on 23 November 1920, and his wife and four daughters joined him a few days later.[40] Cecilie then returned to live in Corfu with her family. At the same time, Princess Alice found out that she was pregnant again.[41] On 10 June 1921, the family welcomed Philip (1921–2021), later the Duke of Edinburgh.[42] The joy that surrounded this birth, however, was obscured by the absence of Prince Andrew, who joined the Greek forces in Asia Minor during the Occupation of Smyrna.[43] Despite worries about the war, Cecilie and her siblings enjoyed life at Mon Repos, where they received a visit from their maternal grandmother and their aunt Louise in the spring of 1922.[44] In the park near the palace, built on an ancient cemetery, the princesses devoted themselves to archeology and discovered some pottery, bronze pieces and bones.[45] During this period, Cecilie and her sisters also participated, for the first time, in a number of great social events. In March 1921, the princesses attended in Athens the wedding of their cousin Helen to Crown Prince Carol of Romania.[41] In July 1922, they went to the United Kingdom to be bridesmaids at the wedding of their uncle Louis Mountbatten to the wealthy heiress Edwina Ashley,[46][47] whose beauty fascinated Cecilie.[48] However, the military defeat of Greece against Turkey and the political unrest that it caused disrupted the life of Cecilie and her family. In September 1922, Constantine I abdicated in favor of his eldest son, George II.[49][50] A month later, Prince Andrew was arrested before being tried by a military tribunal, which declared him responsible for the defeat of the Sakarya. Saved from execution by the intervention of foreign chancelleries, the prince was condemned to banishment and cashiering. The prince and his relatives hurriedly left Greece aboard HMS Calypso in early December 1922.