Prince William will pay his
respects to his Great Grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, at her grave
at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
She was born in 1885 at
Windsor Castle. She was diagnosed as deaf at a young age and became
an excellent lip reader by age eight. In 1903, she married Prince Andrew of
Greece and went on to have five children. The youngest was Prince Philip, born
in 1921.
The family were exiled the
following year to Paris. She grew more devout and suffered under intense mental
strain. In 1930, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to a Berlin
clinic after saying she could hear voices and believed she had physical
relationships with Religious figures. After two and a half years at a Swiss
Sanatorium, she was released to go back home. She lived in Athens Palace and
worked with the Swedish and Swiss Red Cross during the Second World War.
Her time in Athens saw her
become close to the family of Haimaki Cohen, a Jewish former MP, who fled to
Athens when the Nazis began to seize control of Greece.
But when the time came to flee
Athens, Haimaki Cohen was dead and his wife Rachel and family needed sanctuary.
Princess Alice did everything she could to keep her and two of her children
hidden. At one point, she was even interviewed by the Gestapo but managed to
turn them away.
After the war in 1949, she
became a nun and founded a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns on the island
of Tinos. She went to England in 1947 for the wedding of her son, Prince
Philip, to the future queen Elizabeth. She returned to the country in 1967 to
be close to him and his family and died in 1969 aged 84.
She was buried at St George’s
Chapel at Windsor Castle but her final wish was to be buried at the Russian
Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives to be close to her
aunt Elizabeth who had also become a nun and founded a covenant.
Her remains were moved there
in August 1988.
