Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark was the seventh child and fourth son of King George and Queen Olga. He was the grandson of the King of Denmark.
Childhood
Andrey the Greek was born in 1882 in Athens, in a large family of His Royal Majesty King George I of Greece, son of the Danish King Christian IX, and Russian Princess Olga Nikolaevna, granddaughter of Emperor Nicholas I. His father was the founder of the Glucksburg dynasty, which was related to the English royal house. The family had five sons and two daughters. King George I ruled the country for about fifty years, bringing it significantly closer to Russia through dynastic marriages, which significantly weakened Turkey in the Balkans and strengthened Russia's influence in the Mediterranean.
The royal couple spoke German among themselves. Their children, including Andrei the Greek, were fluent in seven languages, but communicated among themselves in Greek, and with their parents in English. The hero of our article, despite myopia, was prepared for military service. Andrei Grechesky graduated from a cadet school and college in Athens and received additional private military education under the program of General Panagiotis Danglis. In May 1901 he enteredcavalry.
Betrothal and marriage
In 1902, Prince Andrew of Greece and Alice of Battenberg (1885-1969) met at the coronation celebrations of King Edward VII in London.
The German princess was related to the English Queen Victoria and the Romanovs. Young people took each other seriously. And just a year later, in early October 1903, when the prince was 21 and the princess eighteen, they registered a civil marriage in Darmstadt.
The next day, a Lutheran wedding took place in the castle Evangelical Church and a wedding in the Greek Orthodox chapel.
The prince and princess had 4 daughters and one son, who all had descendants.
| Name | Birth | Death | Notes |
| Princess Marguerite | April 18, 1905 | April 24, 1981 | Was married since 1931 to Prince Hohenlohe |
| Princess Theodora | May 30, 1906 | October 16, 1969 | Married Prince Berthold of Baden in 1931 |
| Princess Cecile | June 22, 1911 | November 16, 1931 | Married since 1931 |
| PrincessSophie | June 26, 1926 | November 21, 2001 | First marriage in 1930, second in 1946 |
| Prince Philip | June 10, 1921 | Married to Princess Elizabeth in 1947, later Queen of Great Britain |
This is how Prince Andrew of Greece looked (pictured below) with his large family.
Political career
In 1909, a coup took place in Greece. The point was that the government in Athens did not want to support the Cretan parliament, which called for the unification of Crete (the island was still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire) with mainland Greece. A group of officers, dissatisfied with this situation, created the Greek National Military League. His Highness Prince Andrew retired from the army and Venizelos came to power.
Three years later, the Balkan wars began. Prince Andrew of Greece was reinstated in the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel in the 3rd Cavalry Regiment. He oversaw the field hospital. At the behest of his heart, his wife acted as a nurse. She even courageously participated in operations. At the same time, Andrey's father was killed, and the prince inherited the My Rest villa from him.
By 1914, His Highness had military awards from Russia, Prussia, Italy and Denmark, and also held military positions in the Russian and German empires.
During the First World War, he continued to visit relatives inUnited Kingdom, despite the deaf protests of the British House of Commons, which considered him a German agent. His brother, King Constantine, pursued a policy of neutrality.
But the French Republic, Russian and British empires supported the government of Venizelos. The Greek king abdicated in 1917 and since then almost the entire royal family has lived in Switzerland.
Return to Greece
Some time on the throne was the son of Constantine Alexander, but then the king was restored again. The whole family settled in an ancestral villa in Corfu.
During the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922, Prince Andrei commanded the second army corps. His work was hampered by the poor training of officers. He refused to carry out the order of the commander-in-chief and attack the Turkish positions because of the panic among the officers. The prince was removed from command for two months, but later returned to the army. And when the revolutionary movement swept Greece in 1922, the prince was arrested and was on the verge of death.
Emigration
On board the British cruiser Calypso, the prince's family was taken to safety and settled on the western outskirts of Paris. Wife Alice suffered a nervous breakdown and was placed in a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland. Their daughters married one after another and lived in Germany, and their son studied in Britain. Due to illness, Alice could not attend her daughters' weddings.
After being cured, she lived separately fromhusband, although they were not divorced. Princess Alice did a lot of charitable work. During the Nazi occupation, she remained in Athens, where she tried to help Jews avoid roundups and concentration camps.
Life on the French Riviera
His Highness settled on the small yacht of his girlfriend Countess André de la Bigne. During the Nazi attack on France, he was forced to live only in Vichy, in territory that was nominally free from the presence of the Nazis. His son Philip fought on the side of the British. But his father did not have the opportunity to see him for five years and died of heart failure at the Metropol Hotel in Monaco in 1944. He did not even know how the world war ended, and about the happy marriage of his son.
