Princess Christina Margarethe of Hesse

Princess Christina Margarethe of Hesse (; 10 January 1933 – 22 November 2011) was a German princess. A first cousin of King Charles III of the United Kingdom, she was the wife, from 1956 to 1962, of Prince Andrew of Yugoslavia, a son of Alexander I of Yugoslavia.

Family background and early life Born in Germany on 10 January 1933 at Friedrichshof Castle near Kronberg im Taunus, Princess Christina ("Krista") of Hesse was the eldest child of Prince Christoph of Hesse (1901–1943) and Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark (1914–2001) Her father, Prince Christoph of Hesse, was a nephew of Germany's last emperor Wilhelm II. Her mother, Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark, was a grand-daughter of King George I of Greece and a sister of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Christina belonged by birth to the senior line of the House of Hesse, a junior branch of which reigned as grand dukes of Hesse and by Rhine within the German Empire until 1918. Christina's paternal grandmother, Princess Margaret of Prussia, was a daughter of Queen Victoria's eldest daughter Victoria, and as such a sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Prince Christoph, a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS), held important positions in Germany's Nazi regime. During World War II, he was a major in the Luftwaffe. On 7 October 1943, when Christina was ten years old, her father was killed in an airplane crash in the Apennine Mountains near Forlì, Italy. and her parents' residence in Berlin-Dahlem. It was reported that the princesses' closest friend in England was Prince Andrew of Yugoslavia.

First marriage Princess Christina of Hesse married Prince Andrew of Yugoslavia, the youngest son of Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Princess Maria of Romania, on 2 August 1956, at Friedrichshof Castle. They had two children: Princess Maria Tatiana ("Tania") of Yugoslavia (born 18 July 1957), lived for a while at Buckingham Palace prior to her marriage to Gregory Thune-Larsen on 30 June 1990, has practised professional photography, and has issue. Prince Christopher of Yugoslavia (4 February 1960 – 14 May 1994), lived first with his father and stepmother in Portugal until their divorce in 1972, whereupon he returned to England to live with his mother and stepfather. Of Sephardic extraction, Robert van Eyck was the son of poet, critic, essayist and philosopher Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck, and the brother of architect Aldo van Eyck. The couple had two children, Helen Sophia van Eyck (born 1963) and Mark Nicholas van Eyck (born 1966). Her first husband Prince Andrew also married for the second time, this time to another cousin, Princess Kira Melita zu Leiningen (1930–2006).

Christina and Robert van Eyck separated in 1985, and divorced 3 February 1986.

In addition to Germany and England, Princess Christina of Hesse had lived in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, and in Gersau, Switzerland.

Ancestry