Death of British Queen’s Husband Severs a Balkan Link

The death aged 99 of Britain's Prince Philip, husband to Queen Elizabeth, ends a long chapter in relations between the British royal family and their Balkan counterparts.

It began in the 1890s, when Princess Marie of Edinburgh became crown princess, later queen, of Romania - and continued when her daughter, also Marie, became Queen of Yugoslavia after marrying King Alexander.

Philip was the third key link in this British-Balkan royal chain, having been born into the Greek royal family in June 1921 on Corfu at a time of desperate crisis for both the country and the dynasty.

His father, Prince Andrew, had commanded an army corps that had joined the invasion of what is now Turkey after World War I on a mission to carve out a greater Greece.

Dreams of expansion turned to disaster when the reinvigorated Turks, under their new leader, Kemal Ataturk, routed the Greek army and torched the once flourishing and mainly Greek port city of Smyrna, now Izmir, leading to the mass expulsion of millions of Greeks from Asia Minor.

The defeated Greeks turned on the royal family in fury and Andrew was sentenced to death for treason.

After Britain protested, they were instead exiled from the country, escaping on a British Royal Navy ship, Philip sleeping in an orange crate. He was only 18 months old. He would never return for long.

More or less adopted by his English uncle, Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy of India, he was drawn by him into the British navy and into the inner circle of the British royals both during and after World War II, soon catching the eye of the teenage heir to the British throne, Princess Elizabeth, his wife from 1947.

His remarkable and eccentric mother, Princess Alice, however, returned to...