Otto of Greece
Otto of Greece was a Bavarian prince of seventeen whom Britain, France and Russia chose in London to be king of a country he had never seen, governed it for thirty years through Bavarian regents, a revolution, a constitution and a blockade, was put on a British ship by the same people who had welcomed him, and died in Bamberg in the Greek costume he had worn every day since. He was born in 1815, the second son of Ludwig I of Bavaria, the philhellene who had built a Greek temple on the Danube, and the London Conference of 1832 made him king because no Greek could be agreed on and no great power would let another's prince have it. He landed at Nauplia in January 1833 with three Bavarian regents and three thousand Bavarian troops, and the regency governed as a Bavarian province: a centralised bureaucracy, a state church cut off from the Patriarch, monasteries dissolved, the klephts who had fought the war treated as bandits. He took the government himself in 1835, moved the capital to Athens in 1834 and began to build it, and married Amalia of Oldenburg in 1836, who planted the royal garden and bore no children. On 3 September 1843 the Athens garrison and a crowd surrounded the palace and demanded a constitution, and he gave one in 1844, with a parliament he learned to manage. He believed in the Great Idea, the recovery of the Greeks under the Ottomans. When the Crimean War came he let irregulars into Thessaly and Epirus, and Britain and France occupied Piraeus from 1854 to 1857 to stop him. The generation that had grown up under him wanted a Greek king and a bigger Greece, the students and officers rose in October 1862 while he was touring the Peloponnese, and the powers advised him to go; he left from Salamis on a British warship without abdicating. Denmark's prince George replaced him. He died in July 1867, and asked to be buried in the fustanella.
- Lived: 1815 CE – 1867 CE
- Nationality: Bavarian
- Roles: king, monarch
