Person:Sophia of Prussia (1)

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Sophia of Prussia (Sophie Dorothea Ulrike Alice, ; 14 June 1870 – 13 January 1932) was Queen consort of the Hellenes from 1913–1917, and also from 1920–1922.

A member of the House of Hohenzollern and child of Frederick III, German Emperor, Sophia received a liberal and Anglophile education, under the supervision of her mother Victoria, Princess Royal. In 1889, less than a year after the death of her father, she married her third cousin Constantine, heir apparent to the Greek throne. After a difficult period of adaptation in her new country, Sophia gave birth to six children and became involved in the assistance to the poor, following in the footsteps of her mother-in-law, Queen Olga. However, it was during the wars which Greece faced during the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century that Sophia showed the most social activity: she founded field hospitals, oversaw the training of Greek nurses, and treated wounded soldiers.

However, Sophia was hardly rewarded for her actions, even after her grandmother Queen Victoria decorated her with the Royal Red Cross after the Thirty Days' War: the Greeks criticized her links with Germany. Her brother Emperor William II was indeed an ally of the Ottoman Empire and openly opposed the construction of the Megali Idea, which could establish a Greek state that would encompass all ethnic Greek-inhabited areas. During World War I, the blood ties between Sophia and the German Emperor also aroused the suspicion of the Triple Entente, which criticized Constantine I for his neutrality in the conflict.

After imposing a blockade of Greece and supporting the rebel government of Eleftherios Venizelos, causing the National Schism, France and its allies deposed Constantine I in June 1917. Sophia and her family then went into exile in Switzerland, while the second son of the royal couple replaced his father on the throne under the name of Alexander I. At the same time, Greece entered the war alongside the Triple Entente, which allowed it to grow considerably.

After the outbreak of the Greco-Turkish War in 1919 and the untimely death of Alexander I the following year, the Venizelists abandoned power, allowing the royal family's return to Athens. The defeat of the Greek army against the Turkish troops of Mustafa Kemal, however, forced Constantine I to abdicate in favor of his eldest son George II in 1922. Sophia and her family then were forced to a new exile, and settled in Italy, where Constantine died one year later (1923). With the proclamation of the Republic in Athens (1924), Queen Sophia of Greece spent her last years alongside her family and died of cancer in Frankfurt Germany on 13 January 1932 age 61 .

1. ↑ ^1.0 1.1 Sophia of Prussia, in Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.