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# Who Was Olga, Queen of the Hellenes?
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/kto-takaia-olga-koroleva-ellinov/
- Published: 2026-05-05T17:36:29.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:09.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Aristocracy, The East, Monarchies, Mores, People

The title "Queen of the Hellenes", rather than "Queen of Greece", is not diplomatic courtesy but a political declaration.

Olga Konstantinovna Romanova was a granddaughter of Nicholas I and a daughter of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich. In 1867, at the age of sixteen, she married King George I of Greece and moved to Athens. She lived in Greece for 53 years, bore eight children, learned Greek, founded schools and hospitals, and during the Balkan Wars ran military hospitals.

In 1832 the Great Powers placed Otto of Bavaria on the new Greek throne with the title "King of Greece", a geographical one, named after a piece of the Balkans freed from the Ottomans. Most Greeks went on living outside those borders: in Constantinople, in Asia Minor, on Cyprus, on Crete, on the Ionian Islands. In 1863 Otto was deposed, the throne passed to the Danish prince George I, and at his accession the title was deliberately changed to "King of the Hellenes". That is, he was king of all people of Greek origin and of the Greek Orthodox tradition, wherever they lived.

This was a programme, known as the "Megali Idea" (the Great Idea), formulated by the prime minister Kolettis as early as 1844: to free from Ottoman rule all Greeks, above all Constantinople, and to restore a "two-headed" state with two capitals, Athens and Tsargrad.

Olga became the consort of such a monarch and bore the corresponding title until her husband's death. The Great Idea died politically in 1922, when Kemal Atatürk's Turkey routed the Greek army in Asia Minor and one and a half million Greeks were expelled from Anatolia. But the title "King of the Hellenes" itself survived with the Greek monarchy until its abolition by referendum in 1974.

After her husband's assassination in Thessaloniki in 1913, and a succession of abdications and exiles of the dynasty, Olga, Queen of the Hellenes, ended her life in Italy in 1926\. Her grandson was Prince Philip, husband of Elizabeth II, and through him the entire present-day British royal family descends directly from the Russian imperial house.

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