Tatoi Palace

The estate lies on a densely wooded slope of Mount Parnitha whose ancient and still official name is Dekeleia. Ancient Dekeleia is believed to have stood where the palace now stands, and the Spartans are thought to have fortified the hill of Palaiokastro there during the Dekelean War. Under Ottoman rule Tatoi was a chiflik alongside its neighbours Machounia and Liopesi, the first belonging to Omer Pasha of Karystos and the other two to the son of Akiase, mufti of Athens; the place name probably comes from that of the Albanian-Vlach chieftain Tatois. After the Greek revolution the Tatoi chiflik was bought by the Phanariot noble Alexandros Kantakouzinos, while Machounia and Liopesi went to Skarlatos Soutsos.

In 1872, urged on by Ernst Ziller, King George I bought the estate of 20,000 stremmata from the Soutsos family for 300,000 drachmas, using private funds he had brought with him from Denmark, and the three chifliks were joined into a single property. Ziller hoped to build a vast palace complex; the King wanted a country estate rather than another palace, to his architect's great disappointment. What Ziller drew instead was a plain two-storey house in a Greek-Swiss manner, gabled and set on a high plinth, intended as a royal guesthouse, a use it was never put to. It was finished in 1874 and became the family's first country residence.

As the family grew the house no longer served, and the architect Savvas Boukis was sent to Russia in 1880 to record an English-style neo-Gothic farmhouse by the English architect Adam Menelaws, the Farm Palace in the grounds of Peterhof, which belonged to Tsar Alexander II, an uncle of Queen Olga. Building on the new villa began in 1884 and was finished in 1886, though work on the garden and the interior held back its opening until May 1889. George I moved into it that year, just after the marriage of Crown Prince Constantine, who was left the use of the old house.

George I built Tatoi as a place where the forest came first and the buildings second, and the estate grew by successive purchases. In 1898, after successive acquisitions and a parliamentary grant to the King, as private property, of the former national estate of Bafi, an old monastic chiflik, it reached its greatest extent of 47,427 stremmata. That did not make it the largest estate in Attica, where the Soutsos family held 250,000 stremmata, but as a recreational estate it was the first in Greece. Its management was directed by Hans Ludwig Mynter, a Danish forester and philhellene, from 1873 to 1892, and then by his successor Otto Weismann from 1893 to 1914.

Two churches went up before the century ended: Prophet Elias in 1873, in an Italo-Byzantine manner, which was the first building completed on the estate, and the cemetery church of the Resurrection in 1899, designed by the palace architect Anastasios Metaxas on the model of the Byzantine church of Panagia Gorgoepikoos. Around them accumulated the working fabric of the estate: a school for the royal children, stables, workers' housing, a winery, a dairy, a telegraph office and quarters for the Guard, with 400 kilometres of roads and rides. The old Soutsos windmill was raised by a storey and battlemented, and George I filled it with an archaeological museum of finds from small local excavations and a zoological museum above. The public road to Chalkida crossed the estate, which kept an inn for travellers and a hotel, the Tatoion, advertised in the guidebooks of the day.

The hill of Palaiokastro received its first grave in 1880, that of Princess Olga, an infant daughter of George I, thirty-three years before the King himself was buried there in a plain tomb. On 6 August 1899, on the initiative of Queen Olga, the church of the Resurrection was founded on that hill to Metaxas's designs, and the family has been buried around it in plain marble tombs ever since; the exception is the funerary chapel built for Constantine I and Queen Sophia, designed by Emmanouil Lazaridis. Tatoi was also the birthplace of two kings, Alexander I and George II. Tsar Nicholas II, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Edward VII and Alexandra, George V and Victor Emmanuel III of Italy were among the guests received at Tatoi; later came Elizabeth II, then heir to the British throne, and Jacqueline Kennedy.

Countless official and unofficial meetings held at Tatoi bore on the course of national and political affairs. The consultations of the summer of 1915 were held there, and two governments were sworn in on the estate in those years: that of Eleftherios Venizelos in August 1915, in Constantine I's old palace, and that of Dimitrios Rallis in November 1920, in the new villa. Stone barracks were put up in the first decade of the century, and a staff building in 1913 and 1914 under Constantine I.

In July 1916 an arson attack ravaged Tatoi Palace. The royal family barely escaped the flames. Sixteen people were killed among the palace staff and the firefighters who came to fight the blaze. Most of the forest burned, together with the palace stables, the church of Prophet Elias, the tower on the Clock hill, the Lyders house and Constantine I's old palace, and the deer George I had brought from Hungary died by the hundred; the telegraph office was damaged. Constantine I was driven from the country in 1917, and King Alexander died at Tatoi in 1920 of septicaemia following a monkey bite.

The politics of the following years left no room for rebuilding. That came in the republican period, under successive governments and under a new director, Vasileios Drouvas, who held the post from 1925 to 1961, and most of the estate was confiscated from its owners during those years. Around 1929 and 1930 the government allowed Dimitrios Gaziadis to film The Apaches of Athens on the estate, and around 1930 the complex of houses and workshops known as the mandra was built, along with a gendarmerie station. Tatoi was returned to King George II in 1936 on the restoration of the monarchy, which brought with it a new directorate building by Konstantinos Sakellarios, the mausoleum, probably the work of Lazaridis, and stone guard posts through the woods. The villa itself was heavily altered in repairs carried out between 1937 and 1939, when the metal lace ornament was stripped off and replaced with reinforced concrete, openings were walled up and new ones cut, and the south-west pediment was done away with.

Meetings were held at Tatoi in the winter of 1941 in the face of the German attack, and again the following April as the front collapsed. With the King in exile and Greeks suffering considerable hardship under German occupation, the woods at Tatoi were cut down for fuel and corpses were buried in shallow graves. Drouvas was left holding a difficult line between the occupying forces and the resistance on Parnitha, with the survival of the estate as his object. Pressure from the mountain grew through the summer of 1944; looting multiplied that autumn and ended in complete anarchy. During the Dekemvriana the estate and the villa were broken up entirely, and the small community that worked there began to count its first dead as the Civil War opened. In the summer of 1945 the estate burned again, most probably for political reasons.

By 1946 Tatoi had to start again from nothing, and King George II regained possession of it in that year. To make up the income lost with the forest, Drouvas turned to selling firewood and to wine and dairy production, and in 1952 a new cowshed of elegant design was built, its produce sold, like the rest of the estate's, to hotels, hospitals, institutions and army camps; the estate architects of the period were K. Ginis and Al. Baltatzis. From late 1948 the royal family lived at the villa permanently. Georgios Papandreou's government was sworn in there in February 1964, King Paul fell ill and died in the house that same year, and the family remained until the morning of 13 December 1967, the day of the counter-coup against the junta.

The estate passed to the Greek state three times, in 1924, 1973 and 1994, each time after a change of regime, and each time either with compensation awarded or with the whole property confiscated. In 1924, after the republic was proclaimed, all royal property, public and private, was taken for the state; compensation was awarded for the private part but never collected. In 1973 the Colonels' junta abolished the monarchy and confiscated the property, awarding a second low compensation that was again never collected, and the estate was abandoned completely in that year: lack of funding left the cows and horses to die of starvation in the stables, and the buildings were vandalised and looted with heavy losses. In 1994, twenty years after the referendum of 1974, the government of Andreas Papandreou confiscated the royal property outright with no compensation paid.

That confiscation was afterwards found unlawful by the European court. Constantine argued that the property had been acquired by his predecessors by lawful means and was therefore ordinary personal inheritance; the Greek state argued that it followed the institution of the monarchy and reverted automatically when the monarchy was abolished, and its lawyers valued the claim in money alone, at fifteen billion drachmas, on the grounds that the family were private citizens without privilege, that no taxes had been paid on the property, and that much of the land was forest of low commercial value. The court held that the property attached to the institution of the monarchy had already passed to the state in 1974, and that Tatoi, the Polydendri estate and Mon Repos were private property for which the Hellenic Republic had to pay reasonable compensation if it wished to keep them. The compensation was paid, and the Anna-Maria Foundation was set up with it in 2003. In March 2003 Tatoi passed into state ownership, and that September it was declared a protected monument by the Central Council of Modern Monuments. With government permission the ex-King had removed nine cargo crates of objects in 1993, some of which came up at Christie's in 2007; about 17,000 objects remained, among them antiquities, old masters and a life-size portrait of Queen Anne-Marie, held in storage by the Ministry of Culture.

The Karamanlis government said in June 2007 that it meant to make the estate a museum, but by September 2012 it was reported that the government intended to sell it; the Friends of Tatoi Association, founded that year, has worked since for its restoration as a museum and public space. The culture ministry moved ahead with restoration in late 2019, and after about a year of conservation work the government announced a mixed-use scheme, with the main house becoming a museum of the royal family alongside a new hotel and spa. The fires of August 2021 were catastrophic: fire broke out in the palace itself and it was saved, but two adjoining containers holding objects were destroyed, and the Directorate building, then in use as a furniture store, the caretaker's house and the telegraph office were among the buildings lost. The area of the royal cemetery burned, though the mausoleum and the Church of the Resurrection came through. After the death of Constantine II, the government decided he would be buried as a private citizen and without head-of-state honours, the service held at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens and the burial beside his parents at Tatoi in 2023, for which the cemetery was cleared of trees burnt in 2021. Lina Mendoni, Minister of Culture and Sports, announced that the government intended to turn Tatoi into a museum by 2025, with the exterior renovated and the royal gardens put in order; the forest had begun to recover by 2024, and the works were expected to be complete by late 2025.