Church bells tolled mournfully throughout Athens. Atop Lycabettus hill, a lone cannon boomed an hourly salute. Women wept in the streets, and only funeral dirges were played on the radio. Throughout Athens, Greece's blue and white flag flew at half-staff for King Paul of the Hellenes, who died of thrombosis in the lungs last week at 62, after a 17-year reign that had seen Greece rise from destitution and civil war to become one of the most stable states in Europe.
For days, the royal family had kept a death watch around Paul's bedside at Tatoi palace, 15 miles north of Athens.
From the Aegean island of Tenos, Greece's Lourdes, a sacred, jewel-encrusted ikon of the Virgin Mary, which is believed to work miracles, was sped by naval destroyer and limousine to the King's sickroom. Briefly Paul rallied.
"I think I feel better," he said. A few hours later, he died. Her eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep, Queen Frederika kissed her dead husband, then tearfully turned to her son, now King Constantine II, and said: "May you reign with his benediction."
Bearded Return. Descended from Denmark's royal House of Glücksburg, which took over the Greek throne in 1863, Paul did not have a drop of Hellenic blood in his veins. Throughout his youth, Greece's chaotic politics periodically sent the young prince into exile. Between 1923 and 1935, he slipped back into republican Greece just once, disguised by a thick black beard and posing as a deck hand on a friend's yacht.
In 1938, two years after the Greek electorate called his older brother George back to the throne, Paul married his youthful German cousin, Princess Frederika of Hanover, 16 years his junior, in an elaborate royal wedding in Athens. But royal housekeeping lasted only until the German Wehrmacht blasted into Greece in 1941. With his wife and two small children, Princess Sophie and Prince Constantine, Paul fled to Crete, then to Cairo, and finally to South Africa, where his third child, Princess Irene, was born.
Scarcely more than half a year after he returned to Athens at the end of the war, Paul succeeded George, who had died suddenly of a heart attack. Greece was battered and bleeding from the war. In the north, Communist guerrillas were fighting and winning a civil war against their countrymen. Quietly and efficiently, Paul and Frederika set out to rally their people against the Communists. In Jeeps and on mule-back, the royal couple visited fighting fronts, slept on dirt floors and ate with peasants.
Once, on a tour of the front lines with Frederika and General James Van Fleet, head of the U.S. military mission, Paul zigzagged his car down a rough country road that was under heavy Communist fire. "If your husband wasn't King," Van Fleet exploded to Frederika, "I'd tell him what a damn fool I think he is." When the war was finally won in 1949, Paul could take a large share of the credit for unifying Greece against the Reds.