Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie (February 25, 1885 - December 5, 1969) was the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II, and paternal grandmother of King Charles III.
Born in Windsor Castle congenitally deaf, she was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and grew up in the United Kingdom, Germany and Malta. She was Hessian princess by birth, and a member of the Battenberg family.
She married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark (known as Andrea within the family) in 1903, and adopted the style of her husband, becoming "Princess Andrew". The couple had five children: Margarita, Theodora, Cecilie, Sophie, and Philip.
She lived in Greece until the exile of most of the Greek royal family in 1917. On returning to Greece a few years later, her husband was blamed in part for the country's defeat in the Greco-Turkish War, and the family was once again forced into exile until the restoration of the Greek monarchy in 1935.
In 1930, Alice was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a sanatorium in Switzerland; thereafter, she lived separately from her husband. After her recovery, she devoted most of her remaining years to charity work in Greece. She stayed in Athens during the Second World War, sheltering Jewish refugees, for which she is recognised as "Righteous Among the Nations" by Israel's Holocaust memorial institution, Yad Vashem. After the war, Alice stayed in Greece and founded a Greek Orthodox nursing order of nuns known as the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary.
After the fall of King Constantine II of Greece and the imposition of military rule in Greece in 1967, she was invited by her son and daughter-in-law to live at Buckingham Palace in London, where she died two years later. In 1988, her remains were transferred from a vault in her birthplace, Windsor Castle, to the Church of Mary Magdalene at the Russian Orthodox convent of the same name on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Princess Alice was posthumously named a Hero of the Holocaust by the British Government in 2010.
9 сен 2024
