Searching For A British Princess Buried On Jerusalem's Mount Of Olives
On a sunny day in Jerusalem, I decided to go looking for a princess. Not just any princess, but Princess Alice of Battenberg, also known as Royal Highness Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark, grandmother of King Charles III.
Alice was also named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust center, for saving a Jewish family. Royal watchers know her as the mother of the late Prince Phillip, as shown in an episode of the popular British TV show The Crown.
How did the British-born Princess end up on the Mount of Olives, outside the Garden of Gethsemane, under the seven golden domes of a Russian Orthodox church? We drove the narrow roads of East Jerusalem to find out.
The Mount of Olives is an appropriate place for a princess to be buried. King David named it as a site for prayer and would prostrate himself there. The local olive trees have long furnished the oil used to anoint kings and high priests. At his coronation, King Charles III of England was anointed with olive oil from the Monastery of Mary Magdalene, where his grandmother is buried.
The Mount of Olives, across a valley from Jerusalem's walls, has been a Jewish graveyard for 3,000 years. The view towards the walls of the old city, the Dome of the Rock and the Tower of David, is literally to die for. No wonder with over 150,000 graves, locals call it 'the most expensive real estate in Jerusalem.'
Mount of Olives View in Jerusalem city scape, Israel.
But Princess Alice is not buried amongst the stone crypts on the hillside. Instead, she resides within the Monastery of Mary Magdalene, a beautiful Russian Orthodox church.
Princess Alice lived a long and difficult life with courage and conviction. A great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she was born in Britain's Windsor Castle in 1885. She was related to most of Europe's royal families. Yet that did not guarantee an easy life.
She was born profoundly deaf but learned lip-reading by age eight. She also learned to sign, and was fluent in English, German, French and later, Greek. At 17 she met Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark at the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902. She married him a year later.
The Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene, where the tomb of Princess Anne now resides, was built in 1888. Known for its distinctive golden onion domes it was built in memory of the Russian Czar's mother, Empress Maria Alexandrovna.
In 1908 Princess Alice visited Russia and met with her aunt Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna. Alice was impressed with the plans of the Duchess to found a religious order of nurses. After her own conversion to Orthodoxy in 1928, Alice worked with the poor and gave away most of her possessions.
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, is shown in a reunion ... More with his mother, Princess Alice of Greece. Princess Alice, widow of Prince Andrew of Greece is living a semi-cloistered life as a nun on the Aegean Island of Tinos, where she has formed an order of deaconesses. She wears a habit similar to that of the Greek Orthodox religious orders.
In 1918, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna were killed by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. Duchess Feodorovna's remains were ultimately buried at Monastery of Mary Magdalene. At the end of her life, Princess Alice would ask to be buried in Jerusalem next to her aunt.
Princess Alice had four daughters and Phillip, who was born in Greece in 1921. However, shortly after his birth, defeat in the Greek Turkish war resulted in Alice's husband Prince Andrew being charged with treason. Well aware of the murders of their cousins the Romanovs, the family fled in a Royal Navy ship in 1922, with Phillip hidden in a fruit box.
The family lived briefly in Paris, but Philip was sent to live in England for boarding school. Princess Alice had a breakdown, claiming she was receiving divine messages and had healing powers. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was forcibly removed from her family and committed to a Swiss sanatorium in 1930, She was treated by Sigmund Freud, who insisted Alice had a sex addiction and needed to have her ovaries X-rayed.
Alice was eventually released in 1932, but the family had dissolved. The daughters were married off to German noblemen. Prince Andrew had gone to live on the French Rivera with a countess.
Princess Alice returned to Greece alone in 1938. When Axis forces took over Greece in 1941, she worked with the Red Cross and organized soup kitchens and shelters. Because her daughters had married Germans, the Nazis presumed she was pro-German. But when a German general asked what he could do for her, she said, 'You could leave my country.'
Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, visits the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum on September 7, ... More 2007 in Jerusalem, Israel. During the Second World War, Prince Edward's grandmother Princess Alice of Battenberg sheltered Jewish refugees, for which she is recognised with a symbolic tree as 'Righteous Among the Nations' at Yad Vashem. (Photo by Mati Milstein/British Embassy via Getty Images)
During the German occupation, more than 85% of the 77,000 Jews living in Greece were murdered. Princess Alice had long known the family of Haimaki Cohen, a Jew and former member of Parliament. In 1941, they fled to then Italian-controlled Athens. But in 1943, the Germans occupied Athens and began deporting Jews. Rachel Cohen, her daughter and son were unable to escape.
When Princess Alice heard about their situation, she offered to shelter the family. The Germans were suspicious. When Alice was questioned by the Gestapo, she pretended not to understand their questions due to her deafness until they left. The Cohens were successfully hidden until liberation in 1944.
Princess Alice survived the war, attending Phillip's wedding to Elizabeth in 1947. At Elizabeth's coronation in 1953, she wore a gray nun's habit. The royal family insisted she leave Greece again after a coup overthrow the government in 1967. She died in Great Britain in 1969 and was buried in Windsor Castle. But before her death she had asked to be buried near her Aunt Elizabeth. In 1988, her remains were moved to the Church of Mary Magdalen.
In 1993 Yad Vashem bestowed the title of Righteous Among the Nations on Princess Alice. A year later, her children, Prince Philip and Princess George of Hanover, traveled to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to plant a tree in her honor. Prince Philip said, "I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She was a person with deep religious faith and she would have considered it to be a totally human action to fellow human beings in distress."
In 2018 her great-grandson Prince William visited her crypt, on the first official Royal visit to Israel.
Finding Princess Alice and getting in to see her can be tricky. Many tours will take you to the church and many holy sites nearby. One can also hire a taxi for the day. There is little parking in the area so drop-off and pick-up should be coordinated.
Landscape view of Mary Magdalene Church on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
Several websites state that the church is open to visitors only on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM. However, we were told that it is open to visitors throughout the week. To view Princess Anne's tomb, you must request that the tomb area be opened.
On our visit, after circling around on the narrow, dusty roads, we found an entrance. Father Roman, a distinguished figure with curly black hair and floor-sweeping black cassock, let us in. We walked through the garden tended by the nuns and into the beautiful church.
After marveling at the glittering artifacts inside, he brought us outside again. He opened a door to Princess Alice's crypt. It was like a journey to the past, with photographs of the Romanovs and other royal families. Princess Alice lay in a simple coffin, finally at peace.
circa 1910: Alice, Princess of Greece, (1885 - 1969), the wife of Prince Andrew of Greece, (1882 - ... More 1944), and mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Born Princess Alice of Battenberg, she was a great grand-daughter of Queen Victoria. (Photo by)
We stayed a moment, alone with our thoughts. But before we left, we had an only-in-Israel moment. I asked Father Roman how long he had been in charge of the church. 'Six years,' he said. 'Is that when you came from Russia?' I asked, visualizing him stepping off an Aeroflot jet.
'No, I grew up here. I served in the IDF Givati Brigade.' Open-mouthed, our guide, a Jerusalem deputy mayor, and Father Roman started swapping army stories.
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