£12m for daddy’s home
King meets Greek PM in bid to restore Prince Philip’s family palace
THE King met Greece’s Prime Minister last night to discuss a £12.3million restoration of Prince Philip’s family home.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis was entertained to tea at Windsor Castle, where the two men discussed how the monarch is assisting the authorities in Athens in a project to restore the abandoned Tatoi Palace.
The ruined palace, in 10,000 acres of woodland 17 miles north of the capital was the summer residence of the Greek royal family before the monarchy was overthrown by a military junta in 1973.
A labour of love for the King, 74, it is the final resting place of Philip’s father and King Charles’s grandfather, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, who died in 1944.
King Charles, who visited Tatoi last year during a trip to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, is supporting plans to restore the palace and turn it into a museum.
His Prince’s Foundation is providing expert advice to the Greek authorities on how to achieve it, using Charles’s rescue of Dumfries House, a Palladian country house in Ayrshire, as a model.
“They want to use it as an example of best practice,” said a spokesman for King Constantine, the last King of Greece. Constantine, who remained in exile for almost 40 years after his country voted to become a republic, retained the palace as his private property until it was confiscated by the state in 1994.
The King’s role in leading a consortium that paid £45million to save the then dilapidated 18th century Dumfries House will be celebrated in an ITV documentary tomorrow night.
He has given an interview to the makers of A Royal Grand Design, which airs at 9pm tomorrow and tells the story of the rescue, which nearly bankrupted the then Prince of Wales.
The monarch tells the programme it was “an appalling risk” but one worth taking.
“I wanted to rescue the house because it is of such importance,” he says. “I knew it was a very deprived area. I wanted to use it as a proper example of, what I’ve always believed in, heritage-led regeneration.”
Recorded before he acceded to the throne, he added: “If we hadn’t stepped in, somebody would have bought it and said they had a great idea, you know for golf courses and it would never have worked, so, it would have joined the list of yet more derelict country houses.”
■ A Royal Grand Design, airs tomorrow at 9pm on ITV.