RESIDENCE OF THE LIVING AND THE DEAD.

The new issue of D’Casa Magazine, January-February, a dual bimester, ends the fall-winter season and begins the spring-summer season. The duality always present in our life and in nature, light and shadow, life and death.

The Tatoi Palace of the Royal Family of Greece also presents this duality as it is both a residence and a cemetery, a resting place for the living and the dead. Located in the northern suburbs of bustling Athens, the capital of Greece, Tatoi is a quiet, country place. It served as a family residence and resting place for the royal family. Its abandoned buildings and gardens heard family laughter and also laments for their dead.

This little-known palace of a royal family without a throne, emerges from its almost anonymity on the occasion of a sad event, the death of King Constantine II of Greece on January 10 of this year and his subsequent burial a week later along with all his royals. predecessors. A descendant of kings and emperors, King Constantine II was best known for being the husband of Anna Maria, sister of Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, and for being the brother of Queen Sofia of Spain. Tatoi is a complex of buildings in a large countryside with vineyards and olive groves. During the reign of Georgios I, the German architect Ernst Ziller began construction of the Old Palace in 1872, in a neoclassical style with elements of a Swiss chalet.

In 1884 construction began on the New Palace, in a style inspired by the Russian Peterhof Palace, in Saint Petersburg, the birthplace of Queen Olga. The architect was Sabbas Boukes, a Greek, who mixed the neoclassical style with the touches of a French country residence.

Finally, to the south of this large estate, another Greek architect, Anastasios Metaxas, began to build in 1898 the construction of the Church of the Resurrection with the royal mausoleum, commissioned by Queen Olga who wanted a place to bury the dead of the family. . This complex of Greek Romanesque architecture contains the tombs of the last 6 kings of this dynasty, their consorts and various princes and princesses.

Being a private property, that is, owned by the royal family and not by the Kingdom of Greece, Tatoi became his favorite residence, where the protocol was less rigorous and the staff smaller. The atmosphere, although more relaxed, maintained its formality and elegance, as well as being a place for parties and celebrations, it also served as lodging for distinguished guests.

Finally, in 2003, the Greek State seized the Tatoi Palace, promising economic compensation that has not yet been paid and that would be destined for the Queen Anna Maria Foundation for needy Greek children.

Despite everything, in the midst of abandonment, after having lived through so many joys and sorrows, the Tatoi Palace continues to house its rightful owners, the kings of Greece, in its mausoleum.