GQ’s dedication to the offspring of Greece’s former royal family is titled, “The Return of Greece’s Former Playboy Prince Nikolaos”. The gentlemen’s magazine reports that after 44 years in exile, the “enigmatic Greek royal playboy once called the ‘Most Wanted Prince in London’ has returned to a country in turmoil.” This means, that the wanted “prince” is back in the republic, not as a prince but as a landscape photographer who uses his art to rediscover his roots… despite the fact that the royal family was of Bavarian rather than Greek lineage.
Much ado is made of his diplomacy when referring to matters of politics. Asked about the Radical Left Coalition (SYRIZA), the representative of Greece’s ousted monarchy said in June: “I believe the government is doing its best in its own way. They’ve got a mandate from the people and they’re trying to fulfil that mandate and I sincerely wish them well.”
Rather than focus on his political beliefs, the magazine is interested in his physique, describing him as a “tall, good-looking man, (with) rather hooded eyes, which makes his cautiousness more pronounced.”
Described as modest, like most Greeks, Greece’s Nikolaos Glucksbuerg is “getting on with his life”. He has reliable gallery connections and has found that the “art world is no less bruising than the world of politics, ad its resourcefully cynical custodians don’t suffer fools gladly” but the prince has a number of admirers.
His decision to move back to Greece at a time of crisis was a brave one bearing in mind that most young people were leaving. He said that the decision was made by his Swiss-raised Venezuelan wife, Tatiana. ” We don’t have children yet, so it wasn’t a question of putting children in new schools or worrying about how they were going to adapt, so we said if we’re going do it, it’s got to be now and I haven’t regretted it at all. Living abroad in quote-unquote ‘exile’, you long for what you can’t have. I was always brought up as a Greek, but there’s one thing to see it on a postcard and another to actually live in the country where you belong. I went to a Greek school with Greeks, and I love the Greek people. Even though I went to a boarding school, I was taught the Greek language, Greek culture, Greek ways of living.”
He was educated at the Hellenic College in London and yearned for all things Greek while growing up. He studied at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, before joining the British Army and joining the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards as a second lieutenant where he took on the name of Nick Constantine. He worked for Fox News in New York and NatWest Markets before heading the Anna-Maria Foundation – a charity for Greek disaster victims.
He lives like a normal Greek, without security, and for the most part mixes in with the crowd and is relatively unnoticed. No longer a prince, he has reinvented himself as a photographer and his hobby is now his livelihood. He first began to take pictures with an Olympis OM -10 that he received as a birthday present when a boy and hasn’t looked back since.
These days he takes photos using Nikkon. His photos convey a reverence for the panoramic beauty of Greece, a country that has gifted him a title but destroyed his heritage. Unable to involve himself politically in Greece he has embraced the arts and is forging a relationship with the place he always called home but never had the chance to grow up in.
He feels that he has nothing to explain to anyone. “I’m not running for public office. People will make up their own minds about what I do. People are going to appreciate (my photographs) or not. There is a lot of me in the pictures. I think of them as little spiritual moments,” he tells the magazine. “Greece has had all this attention recently, but unfortunately it’s been for the wrong reasons. One of the motivating factors in coming back is wanting to do something positive for the country. I wanted to see if, in my own little way, I could send a positive message about the country. Seeing as I could move back, it seemed ridiculous not to. A lot of people are leaving, and I wanted to make a statement by actually moving here. Who knows, maybe I’ll encourage other people to do the same thing.”
He says that his photos are all about Greece: “I love the light here, I love the sky and I love the earth.” He says that Greece is a passionate and romantic place and his favorite landscape in the world.
The truth is, he did encourage his parents the former king and queen to follow his example in 2013.
Background
Prince Nikolaos is the second son and third child of former King Constantine II of Greece (a first cousin once removed of the Duke of Edinburgh, and Prince William’s godfather) and Anne-Marie of Denmark, the youngest daughter of King Frederick IX of Denmark. Born in Rome in 1969, due to the coup that ousted the monarchy and caused the royal family to flee to Italy two years earlier. In April 1967, right-wing colonels overthrew the democratically elected government. When King Constantine, then only 26 and on the throne barely three years, unsuccessfully attempted a counter-coup eight months later, his family fled to Italy, finally settling in London, in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Seven years later the government officially abolished the monarchy, and so the entire Greek royal family spent the next 40 years in exile.
