Tatoi Palace

Tatoi was the summer palace and 10,000 acre estate of the former Greek Royal Family, and the birthplace of King George II of Greece. The area is a densely wooded southeast-facing slope of Mount Parnitha, and its ancient and current official name is Dekeleia. It is located 27 km from the city centre of Athens,

King George I of the Hellenes obtained the estate during the 1870s purchasing it with private funds he had brought from Denmark. In 1916, during World War I, the house was burned down, possibly at the instigation of the Greek secret police; Queen Sophia being a sister of the Kaiser, the Greek royal family was suspected of being pro-German. (See National Schism).

In the 1920s most of the estate was stolen from its owners, but in 1936 it was returned to King George II.

During the Second World War, when King George II was in exile and Greeks suffered considerable hardships under German occupation, the woods at Tatoi were chopped down for fuel and corpses were buried in shallow graves.

King George II regained possession of the estate in 1946. It passed down as private property to King Constantine until 1994 when the royal states were confiscated by the government of Andreas Papandreou. King Constantine took the matter to the European Court of Human Rights who ruled in his favour in 2003.They were not able to force the return of the estates, but they were able to legally force the government to pay him €12m in compensation, this amounted to only one per cent of its real worth. The government paid his compensation from the Greek Natural Disasters fund trying to embarrass Constantine by claiming by paying out money to him he was harming the Greek people in need. Constantine outwitted the government by setting up the "Anna Maria Foundation" to provide grants to needy Greeks in time of hardship caused by natural disasters. The fund is named after Queen Anne-Marie.

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