title: Saturation diving

text: It is quite common for saturation divers to need to work over a range of depths while the saturation system can only maintain one or two storage depths at any given time. A change of depth from storage depth is known as an excursion, and divers can make excursions within limits without incurring a decompression obligation, just as there are no-decompression limits for surface oriented diving. Excursions may be upward or downward from the storage depth, and the allowed depth change may be the same in both directions, or sometimes slightly less upward than downward. Excursion limits are generally based on a 6 to 8 hour time limit, as this is the standard time limit for a diving shift.


title: Saturation diving

text: These excursion limits imply a significant change in gas load in all tissues for a depth change of around 15m for 6 to 8 hours, and experimental work has shown that both venous blood and brain tissue are likely to develop small asymptomatic bubbles after a full shift at both the upward and downward excursion limits. These bubbles remain small due to the relatively small pressure ratio between storage and excursion pressure, and are generally resolved by the time the diver is back on shift, and residual bubbles do not accumulate over sequential shifts. However, any residual bubbles pose a risk of growth if decompression is started before they are eliminated. Ascent rate during excursions is limited, to minimize the risk and amount of bubble formation.


title: Saturation diving

text: Once all the tissue compartments have reached saturation for a given pressure and breathing mixture, continued exposure will not increase the gas loading of the tissues. From this point onward the required decompression remains the same. If divers work and live at pressure for a long period, and are decompressed only at the end of the period, the risks associated with decompression are limited to this single exposure. This principle has led to the practice of saturation diving, and as there is only one decompression, and it is done in the relative safety and comfort of a saturation habitat, the decompression is done on a very conservative profile, minimising the risk of bubble formation, growth and the consequent injury to tissues. A consequence of these procedures is that saturation divers are more likely to suffer decompression sickness symptoms in the slowest tissues, whereas bounce divers are more likely to develop bubbles in faster tissues.


title: Saturation diving

text: Decompression from a saturation dive is a slow process. The rate of decompression typically ranges between 3 and 6 fsw (0.9 and 1.8 msw) per hour. The US Navy Heliox saturation decompression rates require a partial pressure of oxygen to be maintained at between 0.44 and 0.48 atm when possible, but not to exceed 23% by volume, to restrict the risk of fire


title: Saturation diving

text: For practicality the decompression is done in increments of 1 fsw at a rate not exceeding 1 fsw per minute, followed by a stop, with the average complying with the table ascent rate. Decompression is done for 16 hours in 24, with the remaining 8 hours split into two rest periods. A further adaptation generally made to the schedule is to stop at 4 fsw for the time that it would theoretically take to complete the decompression at the specified rate, i.e. 80 minutes, and then complete the decompression to surface at 1 fsw per minute. This is done to avoid the possibility of losing the door seal at a low pressure differential and losing the last hour or so of slow decompression.


title: Saturation diving

text: Neither the excursions nor the decompression procedures currently in use have been found to cause decompression problems in isolation. However, there appears to be significantly higher risk when excursions are followed by decompression before non-symptomatic bubbles resulting from excursions have totally resolved. Starting decompression while bubbles are present appears to be the significant factor in many cases of otherwise unexpected decompression sickness during routine saturation decompression. The Norwegian standards do not allow decompression following directly on an excursion.


title: Saturation diving

text: The "saturation system", "saturation complex" or "saturation spread" typically comprises either an underwater habitat or a surface complex made up of a living chamber, transfer chamber and submersible decompression chamber, which is commonly referred to in commercial diving and military diving as the diving bell, "PTC" (personnel transfer capsule) or "SDC" (submersible decompression chamber). The system can be permanently placed on a ship or ocean platform, but is more commonly capable of being moved from one vessel to another by crane. To facilitate transportation of the components, it is standard practice to construct the components as units based on the intermodal container system, some of which may be stackable to save deck space. The entire system is managed from a control room ("van"), where depth, chamber atmosphere and other system parameters are monitored and controlled. The diving bell is the elevator or lift that transfers divers from the system to the work site. Typically, it is mated to the system utilizing a removable clamp and is separated from the system tankage bulkhead by a trunking space, a kind of tunnel, through which the divers transfer to and from the bell. At the completion of work or a mission, the saturation diving team is decompressed gradually back to atmospheric pressure by the slow venting of system pressure, at an average of to per day (schedules vary). Thus the process involves only one ascent, thereby mitigating the time-consuming and comparatively risky process of in-water, staged decompression or sur-D O operations normally associated with non-saturation mixed gas diving. More than one living chamber can be linked to the transfer chamber through trunking so that diving teams can be stored at different depths where this is a logistical requirement. An extra chamber can be fitted to transfer personnel into and out of the system while under pressure and to treat divers for decompression sickness if this should be necessary.


title: Saturation diving

text: The divers use surface supplied umbilical diving equipment, utilizing deep diving breathing gas, such as helium and oxygen mixtures, stored in large capacity, high pressure cylinders. The gas supplies are plumbed to the control room, where they are routed to supply the system components. The bell is fed via a large, multi-part umbilical that supplies breathing gas, electricity, communications and hot water. The bell also is fitted with exterior mounted breathing gas cylinders for emergency use.


title: Saturation diving

text: While in the water the divers will often use a hot water suit to protect against the cold. The hot water comes from boilers on the surface and is pumped down to the diver via the bell's umbilical and then through the diver's umbilical.


title: Saturation diving

text: A closed diving bell, also known as personnel transfer capsule or submersible decompression chamber, is used to transport divers between the workplace and the accommodations chambers. The bell is a cylindrical or spherical pressure vessel with a hatch at the bottom, and may mate with the surface transfer chamber at the bottom hatch or at a side door. Bells are usually designed to carry two or three divers, one of whom, the , stays inside the bell at the bottom and is to the working divers. Each diver is supplied by an umbilical from inside the bell. The bell has a set of high pressure gas storage cylinders mounted on the outside containing on-board reserve breathing gas. The on-board gas and main gas supply are distributed from the bell gas panel, which is controlled by the bellman. The bell may have viewports and external lights. The divers' umbilicals are stored on racks inside the bell during transfer, and are tended by the bellman during the dive.


title: Saturation diving

text: The bell is deployed from a gantry or A-frame, also known as a bell launch and recovery system (LARS), on the vessel or platform, using a winch. Deployment may be over the side or through a moon pool.


title: Saturation diving

text: The transfer chamber is where the bell is mated to the surface saturation system for transfer under pressure (TUP). It is a wet surface chamber where divers prepare for a dive and strip off and clean their gear after return. Connection to the bell may be overhead, through the bottom hatch of the bell, or lateral, through a side door.


title: Saturation diving

text: The accommodation chambers may be as small as 100 square feet. This part is generally made of multiple compartments, including living, sanitation, and rest facilities, each a separate unit, joined by short lengths of cylindrical trunking. It is usually possible to isolate each compartment from the others using internal pressure doors. Catering and laundry are provided from outside the system and locked on and out as required.


title: Saturation diving

text: A recompression chamber may be included in the system so that divers can be given treatment for decompression sickness without inconveniencing the rest of the occupants. The recompression chamber may also be used as an entry lock, and to decompress occupants who may need to leave before scheduled.


title: Saturation diving

text: One or more of the external doors may be provided with a mating flange or collar to suit a portable or transportable chamber, which can be used to evacuate a diver under pressure. The closed bell can be used for this purpose, but lighter and more easily portable chambers are also available. There will usually also be a mating flange for the hyperbaric rescue and escape system.


title: Saturation diving

text: A small lock is used for transfer of supplies into and out of the pressurized system. This would normally include food, medical supplies, clothing, bedding etc.


title: Saturation diving

text: The pressurised compartments of the system are connected through access trunking: relatively short and small diameter s bolted between the external flanges of the larger compartments, with pressure seals, forming passageways between the chambers, which can be isolated by pressure doors.


title: Saturation diving

text: The life support system provides breathing gas and other services to support life for the personnel under pressure. It includes the following components:


title: Saturation diving

text: The life support system for the bell provides and monitors the main supply of breathing gas, and the control station monitors the deployment and communications with the divers. Primary gas supply, power and communications to the bell are through a bell umbilical, made up from a number of hoses and electrical cables twisted together and deployed as a unit. This is extended to the divers through the diver umbilicals.


title: Saturation diving

text: The accommodation life support system maintains the chamber environment within the acceptable range for health and comfort of the occupants. Temperature, humidity, breathing gas quality sanitation systems and equipment function are monitored and controlled.


title: Saturation diving

text: Divers working in cold water, particularly when breathing helium based gases, which increase the rate of heat transfer, may rapidly lose body heat and suffer from hypothermia, which is unhealthy, can be life-threatening, and reduces diver effectiveness. This can be ameliorated with a hot water system. A diver hot water system heats filtered seawater and pumps it to the divers through the bell and diver umbilicals. This water can be used to heat the breathing gas before it is inhaled, the divers breathing gas is mainly heated on dive's below 150 metres and region specific will dictate what temperature the water is heated too that will then flow through the diver's hot water suit to keep the diver warm.


title: Saturation diving

text: Helium and high pressure both cause hyperbaric distortion of speech. The process of talking underwater is influenced by the internal geometry of the life support equipment and constraints on the communications systems as well as the physical and physiological influences of the environment on the processes of speaking and vocal sound production. The use of breathing gases under pressure or containing helium causes problems in intelligibility of diver speech due to distortion caused by the different speed of sound in the gas and the different density of the gas compared to air at surface pressure. These parameters induce changes in the vocal tract formants, which affect the timbre, and a slight change of pitch. Several studies indicate that the loss in intelligibility is mainly due to the change in the formants.


title: Saturation diving

text: The difference in density of the breathing gas causes a non-linear shift of low-pitch vocal resonance, due to resonance shifts in the vocal cavities, giving a nasal effect, and a linear shift of vocal resonances which is a function of the velocity of sound in the gas, known as the Donald Duck effect. Another effect of higher density is the relative increase in intensity of voiced sounds relative to unvoiced sounds. The contrast between closed and open voiced sounds and the contrast between voiced consonants and adjacent vowels decrease with increased pressure. Change of the speed of sound is relatively large in relation to depth increase at shallower depths, but this effect reduces as the pressure increases, and at greater depths a change in depth makes a smaller difference. Helium speech unscramblers are a partial technical solution. They improve intelligibility of transmitted speech to surface personnel.


title: Saturation diving

text: Gas storage and blending equipment are provided to pressurize and flush the system, and treatment gases should be available appropriate to the planned storage depths. Bulk stock of premixed gas is usually provided to suit the planned depth of the operation, and separate bulk stock of helium and oxygen to make up additional requirements, adjust chamber gas composition as the oxygen is used up, and mix decompression gas.


title: Saturation diving

text: Bulk gas is usually stored in manifolded groups of storage cylinders known as "quads", which usually carry about 16 high pressure cylinders, each of about 50 litres internal volume mounted on a frame for ease of transport, or larger frames carrying larger capacity high pressure "tubes". These tube frames are usually designed to be handled by intermodal container handling equipment, so are usually made in one of the standard sizes for intermodal containers.


title: Saturation diving

text: A helium reclaim system (or push-pull system) may be used to recover helium based breathing gas after use by the divers as this is more economical than losing it to the environment in open circuit systems. The recovered gas is passed through a scrubber system to remove carbon dioxide, filtered to remove odours and other impurities, and pressurised into storage containers, where it may be mixed with oxygen to the required composition. Alternatively the recycled gas can be more directly recirculated to the divers.


title: Saturation diving

text: During extended diving operation very large amounts of breathing gas are used. Helium is an expensive gas and can be difficult to source and supply to offshore vessels in some parts of the world. A closed circuit gas reclaim system can save around 80% of gas costs by recovering about 90% of the helium based breathing mixture. Reclaim also reduces the amount of gas storage required on board, which can be important where storage capacity is limited. Reclaim systems are also used to recover gas discharged from the saturation system during decompression.


title: Saturation diving

text: In operation the gas supply from the reclaim system is connected to the topside gas panel, with a backup supply at a slightly lower pressure from mixed gas storage which will automatically cut in if the reclaim supply pressure drops. The bellman will set onboard gas supply to a slightly lower pressure than surface supply pressure to the bell gas panel, so that it will automatically cut in if surface supply is lost. After locking out of the bell the diver will close the diverter valve and open the return valve on the helmet, to start the gas reclaim process. Once this is running, the reclaim control panel will be adjusted to make up the metabolic oxygen usage of the diver into the returned gas. This system will automatically shut down oxygen addition if the flow of exhaled gas from the diver fails, to avoid an excessive oxygen fraction in the recycled gas. There is an indicator light to show whether the return gas is flowing.


title: Saturation diving

text: The gas supplied to the diver's helmet passes through the same hoses and demand valve as for the open circuit system, but the exhaled gas passes out into the reclaim valve at slightly above ambient pressure, which is considerably above atmospheric pressure, so the flow must be controlled to prevent dropping the helmet internal pressure and causing the demand valve to free-flow. This is achieved by using back-pressure regulators to control the pressure drop in stages. The reclaim valve itself is a demand triggered back-pressure regulator, and there is another back pressure regulator at the bell gas panel, and one at the surface before the receiver tanks. Each of these back-pressure regulators is set to allow about a 1 bar pressure drop.


title: Saturation diving

text: Exhaust gas returns to the bell through the diver's umbilical exhaust hose, where it passes through a water separator and trap then through a back-pressure regulator which controls the pressure in the exhaust hose and which can be monitored on a pressure gauge in the bell and adjusted by the bellman to suit the excursion depth of the diver. The gas then passes through the bell umbilical exhaust hose to the surface via a non-return valve and another water trap. When the gas enters the surface unit it goes through a coalescing water separator and micron particle filter, and a float valve, which protects the reclaim system from large volumes of water in the event of a leak at depth. Another back-pressure regulator at the surface controls the pressure in the bell umbilical. The gas then passes into the receiver tanks, where oxygen is added at a flow rate calculated to compensate for metabolic use by the diver.


title: Saturation diving

text: Before entering the boosters, the gas passes through a 0.1 micron filter. The gas is then boosted to storage pressure. Redundant boosters are provided to keep the system running while a booster is serviced. The boosters are automatically controlled to match the diver's gas consumption, and the boosted gas passes through a scrubber where the carbon dioxide is removed by a material like sodalime. Like the boosters, there are at least two scrubbers in parallel, so that they can be isolated, vented and repacked alternately while the system remains in operation. The gas then passes through a cooling heat exchanger to condense out any remaining moisture, which is removed by another 1 micon coalescing filter before it reaches the volume storage tank, where it remains until returned to the gas panel to be used by the divers. While in the volume tank, the gas can be analysed to ensure that it is suitable for re-use, and that the oxygen fraction is correct and carbon dioxide has been removed to specification before it is delivered to the divers. If necessary any lost gas can be compensated by topping up the volume tank from the high pressure storage. Gas from the volume tank is fed to the topside gas panel to be routed back to the bell and diver.


title: Saturation diving

text: The sanitation system includes hot and cold water supply for washbasins and showers, drainage, and marine toilets with holding tank and discharge system.


title: Saturation diving

text: It is common for the control room to be installed in an ISO intermode container for convenience of transport. There are three main control panels, for life support, dive control and gas management.


title: Saturation diving

text: The gas management panel includes pressure regulation of gases from high pressure storage, and distribution to the consumers. Gases will include air, oxygen and heliox mixes


title: Saturation diving

text: The chamber control panel will typically include depth gauges for each compartment, including trunking, blowdown and exhaust valves, oxygen monitoring and other gas analysis equipment, make-up system for oxygen replenishment, valves for supplying therapeutic breathing mixture, closed circuit television monitoring displays, and monitoring systems with alarms for temperature and pressure in the system chambers.


title: Saturation diving

text: The dive control panel will include depth gauges for bell internal and external pressure, diver and bellman depth, and trunking pressure for transfer to the accommodation chambers. There will also be breathing gas pressure gauges and control valves for each diver, and blowdown and exhaust valves for the bell interior, diver communications systems with speech unscramblers, a through-water emergency communications system to the bell, controls, monitors and recording equipment for helmet and bell mounted video cameras, oxygen analysers for diver breathing gas, oxygen and carbon dioxide analysers for bell and reclaim gas, alarms for reclaim gas flow, dynamic positioning and hot water supply.


title: Saturation diving

text: Firefighting systems include hand held fire extinguishers to automatic deluge systems. Special fire extinguishers which do not use toxic materials must be used. In the event of a fire, toxic gases may be released by burning materials, and the occupants will have to use the built-in breathing systems (BIBS) until the chamber gas has been flushed sufficiently. When a system with oxygen partial pressure 0.48 bar is pressurized below about 70 msw (231fsw), the oxygen fraction is too low to support combustion (less than 6%), and the fire risk is low. During the early stages of compression and towards the end of decompression the oxygen levels will support combustion, and greater care must be taken.


title: Saturation diving

text: Built in breathing systems are installed for emergency use and for treatment of decompression sickness. They supply breathing gas appropriate to the current function, which is supplied from outside the pressurized system and also vented to the exterior, so the exhaled gases do not contaminate the chamber atmosphere.


title: Saturation diving

text: A saturated diver who needs to be evacuated should preferably be transported without a significant change in ambient pressure. Hyperbaric evacuation requires pressurised transportation equipment, and could be required in a range of situations:


title: Saturation diving

text: A hyperbaric lifeboat or rescue chamber may be provided for emergency evacuation of saturation divers from a saturation system. This would be used if the platform is at immediate risk due to fire or sinking, and allows the divers under saturation to get clear of the immediate danger. A hyperbaric lifeboat is self-contained and can be operated by a surface pressure crew while the chamber occupants are under pressure. It must be self-sufficient for several days at sea, in case of a delay in rescue due to sea conditions. It is possible to start decompression after launching if the occupants are medically stable, but seasickness and dehydration may delay the decompression until the module has been recovered.


title: Saturation diving

text: The rescue chamber or hyperbaric lifeboat will generally be recovered for completion of decompression due to the limited onboard life support and facilities. The recovery plan will include a standby vessel to perform the recovery.


title: Saturation diving

text: IMCA recognises that though the number of hyperbaric evacuations which have been successfully carried out is small, and the likelihood of an incident needing hyperbaric evacuation is extremely low, the risk is sufficient to justify requiring the equipment to be available. The original meaning for the term "hyperbaric evacuation system" covered the system that actually transported the divers away from the working hyperbaric system such as a hyperbaric rescue chamber, a self-propelled hyperbaric lifeboat, or hyperbaric rescue vessel, all of which float and carry short term life-support systems of varied endurance, but it has more recently come to include all of the equipment that would support a hyperbaric evacuation, such as a life support package that can be connected to a recovered hyperbaric rescue unit, to provide interim life support until decompression facilities are available, and the hyperbaric reception facility where divers can be decompressed and treated in relative comfort. The four main classes of problem that must be managed during a hyperbaric evacuation are thermal balance, motion sickness, dealing with metabolic waste products, and severely cramped and confined conditions.


title: Saturation diving

text: Bell to bell transfer may be used to rescue divers from a lost or entrapped bell. This will generally occur at or near the bottom, and the divers transfer between bells at ambient pressure. It is possible in some circumstances to use a bell as a rescue chamber to transport divers from one saturation system to another. This may require temporary modifications to the bell, and is only possible if the mating flanges of the systems are compatible.


title: Saturation diving

text: Evacuation of a single diver who is medically stable, or a single diver with an attendant, may be possible using a hyperbaric stretcher or a small portable chamber if the duration of the trip is short, the pressure is suitable and the locking flanges are compatible.


title: Saturation diving

text: Most saturation diving is done offshore, in the vicinity of drilling and production platforms, or for salvage work, and requires precise positioning of the bell during the dive. In deep water this is usually done from a specialised diving support vessel, or a suitable vessel of opportunity on which a saturation system has been temporarily installed. Positioning can either be by a substantial anchor pattern, which may interfere with other anchoring spreads already established, and which presents its own set of hazards, or by dynamic positioning, which must be sufficiently reliable and fail-safe for the expected conditions.


title: Saturation diving

text: Scientific saturation diving is usually conducted by researchers and technicians known as aquanauts living in an underwater habitat, a structure designed for people to live in for extended periods, where they can carry out almost all basic human functions: working, resting, eating, attending to personal hygiene, and sleeping, all while remaining under pressure beneath the surface.


title: Saturation diving

text: The diving depth record for offshore diving was achieved in 1988 by a team of professional divers (Th. Arnold, S. Icart, J.G. Marcel Auda, R. Peilho, P. Raude, L. Schneider) of the Comex S.A. industrial deep-sea diving company performing pipe line connection exercises at a depth of 534 meters of sea water (msw) (1752 fsw) in the Mediterranean Sea during a record scientific dive.


title: Saturation diving

text: In the real working conditions of the offshore oil industry, in Campos Basin, Brazil, Brazilian saturation divers from the DSV "Stena Marianos" (later "Mermaid Commander" (2006)) performed a manifold installation for Petrobras at depth in February 1990. When a lift bag attachment failed, the equipment was carried by the bottom currents to depth, and the Brazilian diver Adelson D'Araujo Santos Jr. made the recovery and installation.


title: Saturation diving

text: In 1992, Greek diver Theodoros Mavrostomos achieved a simulated of seawater depth in an on shore hyperbaric chamber. He took 43 days to complete the record experimental dive, where a hydrogen–helium–oxygen gas mixture was used as breathing gas.


title: Saturation diving

text: The complexity, medical problems and accompanying high costs of professional diving to such extreme depths and the development of deep water atmospheric diving suits and ROVs in offshore oilfield drilling and production have effectively eliminated the need for ambient pressure manned intervention at extreme depths.


title: Saturation diving

text: Training of saturation divers generally takes place at commercial diving schools registered to train saturation divers, and having the required infrastructure and equipment.


title: Saturation diving

text: Diver training standards for saturation divers are published by a small number of organisations, and there is some international recognition of equivalence. The prerequisites for starting training are generally that the diver is already qualified as a bell diver and has a specified number of dives and hours of experience since qualifying.


title: Saturation diving

text: Training of saturation divers generally starts with a competent and at least moderately experienced surface oriented bell diver and concentrates on the additional knowledge and skills required for saturation diving. There is a large additional technical component related to the specialised equipment.


title: Saturation diving

text: For the South African Department of Labour Class I Diver, the additional knowledge and skills include:


title: Saturation diving

text: The purpose of saturation diving is to extend the useful working time for dives without increasing the exposure to risk of decompression sickness. There is a trade-off against other risks associated with living under high-pressure saturation conditions, and the financial cost is high due to the complex infrastructure and expensive equipment and consumables required. The risk of decompression sickness is reduced at the cost of increased risk due to being committed to the saturation environment for the duration of the decompression schedule associated with the storage depth. Hyperbaric evacuation from saturation is possible, but not universally available, and is logistically complicated. Having an evacuation system on standby is expensive.


title: Saturation diving

text: For saturation diving in fiction, see "Pressure" (2015), "The Abyss" (1989), "Sphere" (1987), "Goliath Awaits" (1981), "Dykket (The Dive)" (1989), "Pioneer (Pionér)" (2013) and The Neptune Factor (1973).


title: Saturation diving

text: In 2019, Netflix released "Last Breath", a documentary which tells the story of Chris Lemons, a saturation diver who survived 30 minutes without a surface-supplied breathing gas supply after the vessel's dynamic positioning system failed during a storm, setting off a red alert. The two working divers started returning to the bell, but the ship drifted from the work site, dragging the bell with it, and his umbilical was snagged and severed under the load. He was able to return to the workplace using his bailout set, so was easily found by an ROV from the ship, but his bailout gas was insufficient for the time it took to get the ship back on position for a rescue attempt from the bell. Although presumed dead by support crew aboard the vessel, he was recovered by the second diver and successfully resuscitated in the bell. It has been hypothesised that his survival may have been a result of hypothermia, high partial pressure of oxygen in the bailout gas, or a combination. The ROV video footage shows him twitching while unconscious, which is consistent with an oxygen toxicity blackout.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark (; 26 June 1914 – 24 November 2001) was by birth a Greek and Danish princess as well as Princess of Hesse-Kassel and Princess of Hanover through her successive marriages to Prince Christoph of Hesse and Prince George William of Hanover. An elder sister of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (husband of Queen Elizabeth II), she was for a time linked to the Nazi regime.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: The fourth of five children of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Sophie spent a happy childhood. Her early years, however, were affected by the First World War (1914–1918) and the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). For the young princess and her relatives, these conflicts had dramatic consequences and led to their exile in Switzerland (between 1917 and 1920), and then in France (from 1922 to 1936). During their exile, Sophie and her family depended on the generosity of their foreign relatives, in particular Marie Bonaparte (who offered them accommodation in Saint-Cloud) and Lady Edwina Mountbatten (who supported them financially).


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: At the end of the 1920s, Sophie fell in love with one of her distant cousins, Prince Christoph of Hesse. Around the same time, her mother was struck by a mental health crisis which led to her confinement in a Swiss psychiatric hospital between 1930 and 1933. Married in December 1930, Sophie moved to Berlin with her husband. She then gave birth to five children: Christina (1933–2011), Dorothea (1934–2002), Karl (1937–2022), Rainer (born 1939) and Clarissa of Hesse (born 1944).


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Close to the Nazi circles, in which her husband and several of her in-laws were involved from 1930, Sophie joined the National Socialist Women's League in 1938. Deceived by Adolf Hitler, whom she saw as a modest and charming man, the princess became close to Emmy Sonnemann, who became her friend and later married "Luftwaffe" Commander-in-Chief Hermann Göring in April 1935. Attached to Nazism, Sophie and her in-laws therefore served as unofficial intermediaries between Nazi Germany and the European dynasties to which they were related. Under these conditions, the social status of Christoph and Sophie continued to improve and they moved into a large house located in Dahlem, in 1936. The outbreak of the Second World War, however, forced the couple to separate. An SS officer since 1932, Christoph joined the "Luftwaffe", which led him to various European theaters of operation. For her part, Sophie moved with her children to her mother-in-law at Friedrichshof Castle in Kronberg im Taunus.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: The "Führer"s growing distrust of the German aristocracy (from 1942) and the betrayal of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy (in 1943) led the Nazi regime to turn against the House of Hesse-Kassel. Princess Mafalda, daughter of the Italian monarch and sister-in-law of Sophie, was thus imprisoned in Buchenwald, where she was seriously wounded and died shortly after, while her husband, Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse, was confined in Flossenbürg until the victory of the Allies. At the same time, Christoph was found dead in mysterious circumstances, leaving Sophie almost alone with her four children and a fifth one under way as well as the children of Philipp and Mafalda. The tragic events made Sophie realize the true nature of Hitler's regime and turn against Nazism.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: The defeat of Germany and its occupation by the Allies brought new difficulties in the life of Sophie, who found herself in a precarious financial situation due to the theft of her jewelry by American soldiers in 1946 and the sequestration of the property of her first husband until 1953. After living for several months in Wolfsgarten, she began a relationship with another cousin, Prince George William of Hanover, whom she married in 1946. She had three more children by her second husband: Welf Ernst (1947–1981), Georg (born 1949) and Friederike of Hanover (born 1954). The couple moved to Salem, where George William worked as director of Schule Schloss Salem (1948–1959), before settling in Schliersee (from 1959).


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Excluded from the 1947 wedding of her brother Prince Philip to Princess Elizabeth of the United Kingdom (later Queen Elizabeth II) because of her past links to the Nazi regime, Sophie was reintegrated into the royal circles in the early 1950s and attended major events of the aristocracy afterwards. She nevertheless led a discreet and withdrawn life, spending her time through reading, listening to music and gardening. The last of the Duke of Edinburgh's sisters to die, she died in a retirement home in Schliersee in 2001, after losing one of her sons in 1981 and a grandson in 1994. She was the paternal aunt of Charles III.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: The fourth daughter of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Sophie was born on 26 June 1914 at Mon Repos, a palace in Corfu that her parents inherited after the assassination of King George I in 1913. Nicknamed "Tiny" by her family, the princess grew up within a united household, together with her elder sisters Margarita (1905–1981), Theodora (1906–1969), and Cecilie (1911–1937). With their mother, Sophie and her sisters communicated in English, but they also used French, German, and Greek in the presence of their relatives and governesses.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Sophie's early childhood was marked by the instability that the Kingdom of Greece experienced due to the First World War. The conflict divided her family into opposing branches, and Greece eventually set aside its neutrality due to the Triple Entente. Sophie and her sisters were in the royal palace of Athens when it was bombarded by the French Navy during the battle in the capital on 1 December 1916. In June 1917, King Constantine I, Sophie's uncle, was finally deposed and driven out of Greece by the Allies, who replaced him on the throne by his second son, the young Alexander. Fifteen days later, Sophie's family was in turn forced into exile and had to leave Mon Repos in order to remove the possibility of the new monarch being influenced by those close to him. Forced to reside in German-speaking Switzerland, the small group first stayed in a hotel in St. Moritz, before settling in Lucerne, where they lived with uncertainty about their future.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Homesickness caused by exile was not the only source of anguish for the family, however. Following the Russian Revolution, Sophie's Romanov relatives were murdered in Russia. Shortly after these events, the Grand Ducal family of Hesse, to which Sophie was closely related through her mother, was overthrown along with all the other German dynasties during the winter of 1918–1919.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: At the beginning of 1919, Sophie reunited with her paternal grandmother, the Dowager Queen Olga, spared by the Bolsheviks thanks to the diplomatic intervention of the Danes. In the following months, Sophie attended a family reunion with her maternal grandparents, and met her aunt Louise and uncle Louis Mountbatten. For Sophie, who now formed a duo with her third-eldest sister Cecilie, exile was not only synonymous with sadness; it was also an opportunity for long family reunions and walks in the mountains.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: On 2 October 1920, King Alexander, cousin of Sophie, was bitten by a domestic monkey during a walk in Tatoi. Poorly cared for, he contracted sepsis, which prevailed on 25 October, without any member of his family being allowed to come to his bedside. The death of the sovereign caused a violent institutional crisis in Greece. Already stuck, since 1919, in a new war against Turkey, Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos lost the 1920 Greek legislative election. Humiliated, he retired abroad while a referendum reinstalled Constantine I on the throne.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Prince Andrew was received triumphantly in Athens on 23 November 1920, and his wife and four daughters joined him a few days later. Sophie then returned to live in Corfu with her family. At the same time, Princess Alice found out that she was pregnant again. On 10 June 1921, the family welcomed Philip (1921–2021), later the Duke of Edinburgh. The joy that surrounded this birth, however, was obscured by the absence of Prince Andrew, who joined the Greek forces in Asia Minor during the Occupation of Smyrna. Despite worries about the war, Sophie and her siblings enjoyed life at Mon Repos, where they received a visit from their maternal grandmother and their aunt Louise in the spring of 1922. In the park near the palace, built on an ancient cemetery, the princesses devoted themselves to archeology and discovered some pottery, bronze pieces and bones.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: During this period, Sophie and her sisters also participated, for the first time, in a number of great social events. In March 1921, the princesses attended in Athens the wedding of their cousin Helen to Crown Prince Carol of Romania. In July 1922, they visited the United Kingdom to be bridesmaids at the wedding of their uncle Louis Mountbatten to the wealthy heiress and aristocrat Edwina Ashley.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: However, the military defeat of Greece against Turkey and the political unrest that it caused disrupted the life of Sophie and her family. In September 1922, Constantine I abdicated in favor of his eldest son, George II. A month later, Prince Andrew was arrested before being tried by a military tribunal, which declared him responsible for the defeat of the Sakarya. Saved from execution by the intervention of foreign chancelleries, the prince was condemned to banishment and cashiering. After a brief stop in Corfu, the prince and his relatives hurriedly left Greece aboard HMS "Calypso" in early December 1922.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: After a journey of several weeks, which led them successively to Italy, France and the United Kingdom, Sophie, her parents and her siblings settled in Saint-Cloud in 1923. Settled in a house adjoining that of Princess Marie Bonaparte, the family depended for seven years on her generosity, and two other aunts of Sophie: first Princess Anastasia and then Lady Edwina Mountbatten. Marie Bonaparte financed the studies of her nieces and nephew, while Lady Mountbatten gained the habit of offering her nieces her "used" clothes. In fact, Sophie's parents had little income and the children were the regular witnesses to their money problems and their difficulty in maintaining a household.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Deprived of their Greek nationality after the proclamation of the Second Hellenic Republic in March 1924, Sophie and her family received Danish passports from their cousin King Christian X. In Saint-Cloud, the small group spent a relatively simple life. Sophie and her siblings continued their studies in private institutions, and, during their free time, their father took them regularly to Paris or to the Bois de Boulogne. He also spent long hours playing tennis with them. Every Sunday, the family was received for lunch by Princess Marie Bonaparte and Prince George of Greece and Denmark. Sophie and her family also regularly met Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark and his wife Elena Vladimirovna of Russia, who had also chosen France to spend their time in exile with their daughters. Finally, they often saw their cousin Princess Margaret of Denmark, who settled in the Paris region after her marriage to Prince René of Bourbon-Parma.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Sophie and her relatives made frequent stays abroad, and in particular in the United Kingdom. In 1923, the princess was invited to London to be a bridesmaid at the wedding of her aunt Louise Mountbatten to the future Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden. She returned to England in 1925 for the funeral of her great-aunt, Queen Alexandra. In 1926, she went to Italy for the funeral of her paternal grandmother, Queen Olga. A few weeks later, she returned to spend the summer in Great Britain, with her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: In 1927, Sophie met one of her distant cousins, Prince Philipp of Hesse-Kassel. Shortly after, she met two of his brothers, the twins Christoph and Richard of Hesse-Kassel at the manor of Hemmelmark, the home of her great-aunt Princess Irene of Hesse and by Rhine. Despite her being 13 years their junior, the two German princes soon attempted to court her and it was Christoph who managed to grab her attention. Their romance eventually ended in an engagement, which was officially celebrated when Sophie turned 16, in 1930. Around the same time, Cecilie, Sophie's favorite sister, became engaged to another member of the House of Hesse, Georg Donatus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: The happiness of the princess was however clouded by the situation of her mother, whose mental health deteriorated sharply after the celebration of her silver wedding anniversary with Prince Andrew, in 1928. Struck by a mental health crisis, the princess convinced herself that she possessed healing powers and that she was receiving divine messages about potential husbands for her daughters. She then took herself for a saint and soon declared herself the bride of Jesus. Distraught by the situation, Prince Andrew finally made the decision to place his wife in a sanatorium. He took advantage of his family's stay in Darmstadt, on the occasion of the celebration for Cecilie's official engagement in April 1930, to send Alice to a psychiatric hospital located in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: In the absence of their mother, Sophie and Cecilie made their wedding preparations together. The two princesses thus went to London, in the spring of 1930, in order to obtain new clothes. Shortly after, they returned to Paris to put together their trousseau and buy their wedding dresses. The nuptials of Sophie and Christoph were celebrated in Kronberg im Taunus on 15 December 1930. They were married in two religious ceremonies, with the Orthodox one held at Friedrichshof Castle and the Lutheran one at a church in the city. A few weeks later, on 2 February 1931, Cecilie and Georg Donatus married in the presence of their family at the "Neue Palais" in Darmstadt.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: With their honeymoon over, Sophie and Christoph moved into an apartment in Berlin's Schöneberg quarter. After working for a long time in the Maybach car factory in Friedrichshafen, the prince had just been hired as a broker by the Victoria insurance company. While the princess moved to Germany to start a family, Greece went through a tumultuous political period, marked by numerous coups d'état. Confronted with permanent instability, the population gradually lost confidence in the institutions of the Hellenic Republic and King George II (Sophie's cousin) was finally reinstalled on the throne in November 1935.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: In October 1930, Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, introduced his cousin Christoph to the politician Hermann Göring, and it did not take long for the two to form a closer relationship. Under the influence of Göring, the prince and his wife then met Adolf Hitler, who deceived them with his charm and his apparent modesty. Under these conditions, Christoph joined the Nazi Party, first secretly in 1931, and then publicly in 1933. He also joined the SS in February 1932. However, in his family, Christoph was not an exceptional case. His older brother Philipp had become a member of the Nazi Party in 1930. Subsequently, their respective twins, Princes Wolfgang and Richard of Hesse-Kassel, joined the party in 1932. Finally, their parents, Frederick Charles, Landgrave of Hesse and Princess Margaret, followed the example of their sons in May 1938.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Unlike her sisters Cecilie and Margarita, who joined the Nazi Party at the same time as their husbands in 1937, Sophie never became a member of the Nazi Party. Like her sisters-in-law, Princess Mafalda and Princess Marie Alexandra, she nevertheless joined the National Socialist Women's League in 1938. In fact, Sophie had long shown enthusiasm for Nazi Germany. Linked to the elite of the Hitler regime, the princess thus maintained friendly relations with Emmy Sonnemann, and was one of the guests of honor at the time of her marriage in April 1935 to Hermann Göring, who notably had Adolf Hitler as a witness.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: From a financial point of view, the coming to power of Adolf Hitler significantly improved the situation of Christoph and Sophie. In 1933, the prince was appointed personal advisor to State Secretary to the Prussian State Ministry Paul Körner. Two years later, Göring placed Christoph in charge of the "Forschungsamt", an intelligence service responsible for spying on the telecommunications of Nazi Germany. Under these conditions, Sophie and her husband left their old apartment for a new one in 1933, before moving into a large red brick villa located in Dahlem in 1936.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: At the same time as these events, Sophie and Christoph's family grew larger with the successive births of Christina (1933–2011), Dorothea (1934–2002), Karl (1937–2022), and Rainer of Hesse (born 1939). The birth of their eldest son was also an opportunity for the couple to underline their support for Nazism, since the child received, among his names, that of Adolf, in tribute to the "Führer". Sophie also continued to worry about the fate of her mother Alice, whom she visited several times during the latter's confinement in Kreuzlingen between 1930 and 1933. Sophie also happily attended the weddings of her two eldest sisters, Margarita and Theodora, to German princes Gottfried, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg and Berthold, Margrave of Baden in 1931. She was also present at the funeral of her sister Cecilie and her family, who were killed in a plane crash in 1937.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Sophie and Christoph also maintained their ties to their foreign relatives. The princess made several visits to the United Kingdom, and also stayed in Italy (1936) and Yugoslavia (1939). According to historian Jonathan Petropoulos, their travels were an opportunity for the couple to carry out, for the benefit of the Nazi Germany, a parallel diplomacy with their European cousins, such as Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and his wife Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: As a means of protection, Christoph warned Sophie about the need to beware of prying ears and never to speak politics with people other than her sisters and cousins. Even though he probably moved away from the SS from 1934, the prince nonetheless remained a staunch supporter of the Nazi regime. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, he spontaneously enlisted in the "Luftwaffe", while retaining his post as director of the "Forschungsamt". Sophie and her four children then left Berlin to settle in Friedrichshof, near her husband's parents the Landgrave and the Landgravine of Hesse. Then began a close correspondence between the couple, which testified to the love that Sophie and her husband had for each other.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Shortly after Sophie moved to Kronberg im Taunus on 28 May 1940, her father-in-law died in Wilhelmshöhe, making his eldest surviving son Philipp the new head of the House of Hesse-Kassel. At the same time, most of Europe fell under Nazi rule and Sophie's parents found themselves isolated far from their children. After the invasion of France, Prince Andrew was stuck on the French Riviera in June 1940. For her part, Princess Alice chose to stay in Athens despite the occupation of Greece and the departure into exile of other members of the Greek royal family in April 1941. This did not prevent Sophie from continuing to support the Nazi regime, as illustrated by the continuation of her visits to Emmy and Hermann Göring.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: The situation changed from 1942 as the Nazi authorities began to distance themselves from the German aristocracy. In January and October 1943, Princes Wolfgang and Richard of Hesse-Kassel were successively dismissed from the army, without being threatened by the Nazi regime. In April, the "Führer" placed Landgrave Philipp under house arrest, before having him confined in the Flossenbürg camp after Italy's surrender to the Allies on 8 September 1943. A few days later, on 22 September, it was Philipp's wife, Mafalda's turn to be arrested. After two weeks of interrogation, Mafalda, who was the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, was imprisoned in Buchenwald, where she died on 27 August 1944, after being seriously wounded following an aerial bombardment. At the same time, searches were carried out by "Obergruppenführer" Josias, Hereditary Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont, in the residences of Philipp and his mother. All these events led Sophie to open her eyes completely to the true nature of the Nazi regime.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: The tragedies of the House of Hesse-Kassel did not end there, however. On 7 October 1943, Prince Christoph died under mysterious circumstances during a plane crash in the Apennine Mountains, near Forlì. A few months later, Princess Marie Alexandra of Baden (wife of Wolfgang) perished buried during an air-raid on Frankfurt am Main on 29–30 January 1944. Widowed and pregnant with her fifth child (Princess Clarissa, who was born on 6 February 1944), Sophie therefore found herself in a precarious situation, with her mother-in-law, Landgravine Margaret as her main support. Tired and emaciated, the princess was now responsible for bringing up her children on her own, while also taking care of Philipp and Mafalda's four children.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: As Christoph's death was not made public by the Nazi regime, Sophie published a simple death notice for her husband in the "Völkischer Beobachter" on 18 October 1943. A few weeks later, in November 1943, the princess and her mother-in-law received a visit from "Obergruppenführer" Siegfried Taubert, commissioned by Heinrich Himmler to discreetly spy on the family. Aware of their vulnerability, the two women then refrained from expressing doubts about the conditions surrounding Christoph's death. Eager to know more about the fate of Philipp and Mafalda, Sophie tried, on the other hand, to obtain information from Emmy Göring, without success. At the same time, several relatives of the princess visited Friedrichshof, including her mother, Princess Alice, who managed to obtain a pass for Germany at the end of January 1944 and stayed with her daughter until April. Other relatives, including her brother-in-law Wolfgang and their cousin Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia arrived at the castle in February 1945.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: The defeat of Germany and its occupation by the Allies affected the lives of Sophie and those close to her. The United States Army entered Kronberg on 29 March 1945 and Friedrichshof was then partially occupied. Before the arrival of the US Army, the Hesse-Kassels removed compromising documents, such as books of a political nature from their library. They also hid some of their belongings, especially family gems and jewels. This precaution was not unnecessary since the American troops engaged in numerous thefts in the castle. Many objects were stolen there, and its cellars were looted while the estate's peacocks were killed and roasted in front of their owners.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: In the days following the beginning of the occupation, the American intelligence services arrested Princes August Wilhelm of Prussia (7 April) and Wolfgang of Hesse (12 April). With Landgravine Margaret suffering from pneumonia, Sophie found herself in the situation of having to represent her family alone before the authorities. However, on 12 April, the American army ordered the evacuation of Friedrichshof, leaving to Hesse-Kassel family only the use of its dependencies. A week later, on 19 April, they gave them the order to leave, within four hours, the cottages they occupied in the area. Sophie and her mother-in-law had to find refuge with neighbors, and in particular with the parents of the future MP Walther Leisler Kiep.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: While Friedrichshof was transformed into an officers' club by the American army, the Hesse-Kassels settled in Wolfsgarten in May, where they were received by Louis, Prince of Hesse and by Rhine and his wife Margaret Campbell Geddes, who soon took care of the younger children of Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse. The landgrave was in fact kept in detention by the Americans until 1947 and the investigation which was carried out against him as part of the denazification initiative did not end until 1950. Deprived of her husband's property, which was placed in receivership until 1953, Sophie found herself in a very precarious financial situation. Under these conditions, the death of her father Prince Andrew (who died in France in December 1944) brought her a mediocre, but welcome inheritance.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Widowed since October 1943 and mother to five children, Sophie got close to Prince George William of Hanover, son of Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, and brother of Frederica, Queen of the Hellenes. Encouraged by Princess Margaret of Hesse and by Rhine, their romance ended in an engagement, which was celebrated in January 1946. As the House of Hanover was related to the British royal family, George William's father had previously sought permission from King George VI to proceed with the engagement. However, with the UK and Germany still at war, the UK government banned the monarch from responding to it, except in an informal capacity.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: As her wedding was scheduled for April, Sophie was trying to convince to the American authorities to allow her to use the jewelry she left in Friedrichshof and wished to wear during the ceremony. Having obtained the necessary permit, the princess and Landgravine Margaret went to the castle, where they thought they would find the jewelry that Prince Wolfgang hid in the cellar in 1943. To their dismay, however, the two women realized that the jewels had been stolen and an investigation was soon opened to find out what happened to them.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: It was then established that on 5 November 1945, Captain Kathleen Nash, Major David Watson and Colonel Jack Durant had discovered the jewels, whose value was estimated at £2 million at the time, and that they eventually stole them in February 1946. Brought to justice, the three American soldiers were found guilty, but only some of the stolen pieces were found intact, the rest having been dismantled to be more easily sold in Switzerland. In addition, the American government procrastinated for several years around the question of the return of the remaining pieces, which were not given back to their owners until 1 August 1951. In the end, the family recovered around 10% of the stolen jewelry.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Under these conditions, the marriage of Sophie and George William took on a simpler form than expected. Organized at Salem Castle, property of Berthold, Margrave of Baden (husband of Princess Theodora), the event was the occasion for the bride to reunite with her brother Prince Philip, whom she had not seen since 1937 and who came to Germany with his arms laden with food and gifts. In the years that followed, Sophie gave birth to three more children: Welf Ernst (1947–1981), Georg (born 1949) and Friederike of Hanover (born 1954).


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Since 1939, Sophie's brother Prince Philip had been linked to Princess Elizabeth of the United Kingdom. Already in love, the two were unofficially engaged at Balmoral in 1946, and shortly after, Philip adopted British nationality. The couple's engagement was announced officially on 10 July 1947, and preparations for the wedding began immediately thereafter. However, the ties of Philip's family to Germany frightened the British court and government, who feared that the public could be reminded of the Germanic origins of the House of Windsor if the royal family were publicly associated with former Nazi Party members.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Prince Philip found himself unable to invite his sisters to his wedding. Aware of the difficulties their brother had to face, Sophie, Margarita and Theodora nevertheless considered their sidelining wrong and hurtful. They felt particularly dismayed and snubbed when they realized that their cousins, the Queen Mother of the Romanians and the Duchess of Aosta, had been invited despite their countries having been allies of the Nazi regime during the conflict.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Harassed by the press, who submitted requests for interviews with them, Sophie and her sisters spent the wedding day, 20 November 1947, at Marienburg Castle with their families. Invited by the Duke and Duchess of Brunswick, they celebrated the union of their brother in the company of their cousin Princess Elizabeth of Greece and Denmark and Prince Louis and Princess Margaret of Hesse and by Rhine. A few days later, the Greek princesses received a visit from the Queen of the Hellenes (who came to bring them a letter from their mother Princess Alice describing the wedding in detail) and the Duchess of Kent, widow of the bride's uncle.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: With George William having completed his law studies at the University of Göttingen in 1948, he was approached by his brother-in-law, Berthold, Margrave of Baden, to take over the management of the Salem Castle School, which had since been closed due to the Second World War. A former student of the institution, the prince then went to Scotland with his wife to meet with Kurt Hahn, the founder of the school, and to visit Gordonstoun, the establishment that the latter founded when he had to flee Nazi Germany because of his Jewish origins. For Sophie, who was very affected by the way she was treated at the time of her brother's wedding, this trip to the United Kingdom was an opportunity to discreetly reconnect with Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Once in Salem, George William and Sophie settled in a large house provided by the Margrave of Baden, and the children of the princess are educated in the institution run by George William. In fact, the financial situation of Sophie and her husband remained precarious for a long time. For the princess, however, things gradually improved from 1950, when she received a small inheritance from her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven. The conclusion in 1951 of the case of jewelry theft from the residence of Hesse-Kassels, and the end of the investigation into the role of Sophie's first husband Christoph in the Nazi regime in 1953 then helped to normalize her financial situation and that of her five elder children.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Sophie and her family remained in Salem until 1959, when George William gave up his post of school director. In the meantime, the couple welcomed their nieces to their home, Princesses Sophia and Irene of Greece and Denmark, sent to Salem by their father, King Paul, to complete their studies.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Once the monarchy was restored in Greece in 1946, Sophie was invited to Athens by her mother, Princess Alice, some time later, in 1948. In the years that followed, Sophie and George William got closer to their brother-in-law, King Paul of Greece, and to his family. Queen Frederica thus came to consider Sophie as her best friend. As a result, the princess and her husband were regularly welcomed at the Greek Court, and the couple was among the many personalities invited by the Greek sovereign to the "cruise of the kings" in 1954. Sophie and her family were also invited to Athens on the occasion of the wedding of Princess Sophia of Greece and Denmark and Juan Carlos, Prince of Asturias in 1962. They were also present at the wedding of King Constantine II of Greece and Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark in 1964.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: In the early 1950s, relations between the British royal family and their German relatives in turn normalized, and Sophie, her sisters and their husbands were all invited to the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. The princesses and their families were then frequently invited to Buckingham Palace and Sandringham House. In 1964, Sophie was chosen as godmother to her nephew Prince Edward. In 1978, she attended the wedding of Prince Michael of Kent (son of her cousin Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark) and Baroness Marie Christine von Reibnitz. In 1997, she was invited, with her husband, to the celebrations for the golden wedding anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Over the years, Sophie also developed a special relationship with Prince Charles (later King Charles III), who received her on several occasions at his Highgrove residence.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: In 1958, Sophie and George William bought a large chalet located in Schliersee, Bavaria. Well integrated with the local population, the couple led a relatively simple and discreet life in the village. When she was not taking care of her children, Sophie would devote herself to gardening, reading and listening to music while her husband went about his professional tasks. In the same years, the elder children of the princess formed their own families. Princess Christina was the first of Sophie's eight children to marry, in 1956.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Over the years, Princess Alice's state of health became a source of concern for Sophie and her family. Despite repeated requests from her children and her advancing age, she refused to move abroad and continued to live almost alone in Athens most of the year. After the establishment of the Regime of the Colonels in 1967, however, Sophie went to the Hellenic capital to persuade her mother to leave Greece and settle in the United Kingdom, which she finally agreed to do. Two years later, in 1969, Alice died at Buckingham Palace and Sophie and her family traveled to London to attend her funeral. Meanwhile, she had also lost her sister Theodora, who died in Salem a few weeks before their mother.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Struck by these successive losses, Sophie accompanied, in the weeks that followed, her sister-in-law, Queen Frederica and her niece Princess Irene on a spiritual journey to India. This was not the last trip she would make to the subcontinent. In 1975, her son Welf Ernst left Germany with his wife and their five-year-old daughter to settle in an ashram in Pune, with the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Six years later, Welf Ernest died of an aneurysm in 1981 and was cremated in a Hindu ceremony. His death deeply affected his parents, who felt that their son and daughter-in-law had been somehow brainwashed into embracing an unchristian faith. A long legal battle ensued, during which Sophie and George William challenged their daughter-in-law, Wilbeke von Gunsteren, to win the custody of their granddaughter, Princess Saskia of Hanover, who was finally entrusted to her aunt Princess Christina.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: In 1988, Sophie had the satisfaction of making her mother's last wishes come true by transferring her remains to the Church of Mary Magdalene, on the Mount of Olives, in Jerusalem. A few years later, in 1993, the Yad Vashem Memorial honored Princess Alice as "Righteous Among the Nations" for supporting a Jewish family during the Second World War. Sophie and Philip, her last surviving children since Margarita's death in 1981, were invited to the Israeli capital in 1994, for a ceremony in honor of their mother. As the Spanish historian Ricardo Mateos Sainz de Medrano pointed out, there was a certain irony here, considering Sophie's past links to the Nazi regime.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: The year 1994 also brought the accidental death of one of Sophie's grandsons, Prince Christopher of Yugoslavia. A science teacher at a high school in Bowmore, Scotland, the 34-year-old prince died when he was hit by a car on his way home on his bicycle. Informed by the Duke of Edinburgh while staying in the UK, Sophie was shocked by the news.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: The princess spent the last months of her life in a nursing home in Schliersee, where she died on 24 November 2001 and was survived by her husband, seven children, fourteen grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren. Her funeral was held at Wolfsgarten Castle in the presence of many members of the aristocracy, and her remains were buried at the cemetery of St Martin's Church in Schliersee, where she was eventually joined by her second husband, in 2006.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Prince Karl of Hesse briefly discusses his mother's childhood and her ties to the Nazi regime in a documentary about his uncle, "Prince Philip: The Plot to Make a King" (2015). In the same documentary, it is mentioned that Princess Sophie is the author of an as of yet unpublished memoir.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Princess Sophie is also mentioned in episode 7 ("Hesse Jewels") of the second season of the documentary series "Daring Capers" (2001).


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Sophie features as a character in the 2009 Belgian pseudo-film noir "The Hessen Affair" ("The Hessen Conspiracy" on DVD), the plot of which centers around the theft of her jewels and the entirely fictional post-1871 Imperial German crown jewels from Kronberg Castle.


title: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

text: Sophie is briefly portrayed by actress Eliza Sodró in the episode "Paterfamilias" of the second season of the television series "The Crown" (2017).


title: The Masked Singer (American season 2)

text: The second season of the American television series "The Masked Singer" premiered on Fox on September 25, 2019, following a "special sneak peek" aired on September 15, and concluded on December 18, 2019. The season was won by actor/comedian Wayne Brady as "Fox", with singer Chris Daughtry finishing second as "Rottweiler", and singer/talk show host Adrienne Bailon placing third as "Flamingo".


title: The Masked Singer (American season 2)

text: For the season, which featured 16 new costumes, Toybina says her goals were to increase the production quality, emphasize their backstories and increase their mobility. Tree was experimental; Toybina and her team challenged themselves to question "what fabric can do" by creating something new and different. Meanwhile, Fox was steampunk-inspired and the Penguin's mask was chromed in silver. Ice Cream was also innovative; the costume was formed during a complicated process of sculpting the head "out of foam and [waxing it] onto the shoulder." As opposed to stereotypical black and red accents, Toybina wanted to create a sleek costume for Black Widow by experimenting with texture and movement for its design. Similarly, rather than designing the expected appearance of a Leopard, Toybina relegated animal print to the costume's mask only and instead created a vintage look with a Victorian dress and large collar. Toybina says she wanted to push the boundaries of costume design by creating a "theatrical environment" made of petals surrounding the face mask of the Flower. In order to confuse viewers, the celebrity inside the Flamingo saw out of a peephole in the neck instead of the head to hide their true height.


title: The Masked Singer (American season 2)

text: Movie and cultural influences were also present in the season; the hippie-like Eagle embodied Americana and was influenced by rock musicians Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Springsteen, while Skeleton was heavily inspired by the character Jack Skellington of Tim Burton's 1993 film "The Nightmare Before Christmas". The Panda was imagined as a playful costume that would appeal to younger viewers of the show as the necklace was inspired by gumball machines and the clothing Harajuku-like. The Egg costume, which was requested by a contestant, was described as "somewhere between the runway and Lady Gaga." It incorporated egg features in four different ways: the costume's mask was a boiled egg, the hat was a fried egg, the intricacy of the breastplate (which was hand-beaded) represented a Fabergé egg, and the overcoat resembled a cracked eggshell. Toybina inserted the beads and stones into the Butterfly costume by hand, which she says transforms the costume's darkness and sex appeal into beauty onstage.


title: The Masked Singer (American season 2)

text: Increasing the mobility of the celebrities inside the costumes was also a focus of the season's designs, Toybina said. For safety purposes, she had to reduce the extravagance of Ladybug's face mask to make it tight to the face and instead accentuated the volume of the body of the costume. Alternatively, the mask is the main feature of the street-inspired Rottweiler costume to allow the celebrity to move freely onstage. One of the last costumes that was created for the season was Thingamajig, which Toybina says resembles a grandfather and an elf with its long bead and ears. Contrary to popular belief, Toybina insists the costume was not made to resemble asparagus, rather, it was born out of pure creativity.


title: The Masked Singer (American season 2)

text: Filming occurred from July 1 to August 9, 2019. Toybina won a Costume Designers Guild Award in the Excellence in Variety, Reality-Competition, Live Television category in recognition of her work on the finale.


title: The Masked Singer (American season 2)

text: Singer-songwriter Robin Thicke, television personality Jenny McCarthy Wahlberg, actor and comedian Ken Jeong, and recording artist Nicole Scherzinger returned as panelists. Nick Cannon once again returned as host.


title: The Masked Singer (American season 2)

text: Anthony Anderson was a guest panelist in the sixth episode, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (Robert Smigel) was a guest panelist in the seventh episode, Joel McHale returned as a guest panelist in the eighth and ninth episodes, and season one winner T-Pain returned to the show as a guest panelist in the tenth episode.


title: The Masked Singer (American season 2)

text: The competitors were said to have achieved 140 films, 69 Emmy Award nominations, 42 Grammy Award nominations, 31 "Billboard" #1 singles, 22 Broadway shows, 20 platinum records, 19 Emmys wins, 15 marriages, eight divorces, seven Super Bowl appearances, six multi-platinum records, five Hall of Fame honors, three "New York Times" Best Sellers, and two "Time" 100 honors.


title: The Masked Singer (American season 2)

text: The Season 2 winner, Wayne Brady, had been asked to be on the first season of the show, but turned it down at the time. He said he felt viewers would tune in "not because they want to see the talent, but because they want to see the train wreck." After he saw the success of the first season and getting approval from his daughter and ex-wife, he joined in for the second season.


title: The Masked Singer (American season 2)

text: The premiere received a lower 18–49 rating than the first season's but was similar to its average. The ratings for the finale also dropped, though the broadcast was up almost 20percent in viewers from the previous week's episode. "Deadline Hollywood" cited the second season as a major reason why Fox—for the first time in the network's history—ranked number one in fall entertainment programming, and "Adweek" named the show the "Hottest Reality/Competition Series" of 2019.


title: Taxonomy

text: A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. Among other things, a taxonomy can be used to organize and index knowledge (stored as documents, articles, videos, etc.), such as in the form of a library classification system, or a search engine taxonomy, so that users can more easily find the information they are searching for. Many taxonomies are hierarchies (and thus, have an intrinsic tree structure), but not all are.


title: Taxonomy

text: Originally, taxonomy referred only to the categorisation of organisms or a particular categorisation of organisms. In a wider, more general sense, it may refer to a categorisation of things or concepts, as well as to the principles underlying such a categorisation. Taxonomy organizes taxonomic units known as "taxa" (singular "taxon")."


title: Taxonomy

text: The word was coined in 1813 by the Swiss botanist A. P. de Candolle and is irregularly compounded from the Greek , "taxis" 'order' and , "nomos" 'law', connected by the French form ; the regular form would be "taxinomy", as used in the Greek reborrowing .


title: Taxonomy

text: Wikipedia categories form a taxonomy, which can be extracted by automatic means. , it has been shown that a manually-constructed taxonomy, such as that of computational lexicons like WordNet, can be used to improve and restructure the Wikipedia category taxonomy.


title: Taxonomy

text: In a broader sense, taxonomy also applies to relationship schemes other than parent-child hierarchies, such as network structures. Taxonomies may then include a single child with multi-parents, for example, "Car" might appear with both parents "Vehicle" and "Steel Mechanisms"; to some however, this merely means that 'car' is a part of several different taxonomies. A taxonomy might also simply be organization of kinds of things into groups, or an alphabetical list; here, however, the term vocabulary is more appropriate. In current usage within knowledge management, taxonomies are considered narrower than ontologies since ontologies apply a larger variety of relation types.


title: Taxonomy

text: Mathematically, a hierarchical taxonomy is a tree structure of classifications for a given set of objects. It is also named containment hierarchy. At the top of this structure is a single classification, the root node, that applies to all objects. Nodes below this root are more specific classifications that apply to subsets of the total set of classified objects. The progress of reasoning proceeds from the general to the more specific.


title: Taxonomy

text: By contrast, in the context of legal terminology, an open-ended contextual taxonomy is employed—a taxonomy holding only with respect to a specific context. In scenarios taken from the legal domain, a formal account of the open-texture of legal terms is modeled, which suggests varying notions of the "core" and "penumbra" of the meanings of a concept. The progress of reasoning proceeds from the specific to the more general.


title: Taxonomy

text: Anthropologists have observed that taxonomies are generally embedded in local cultural and social systems, and serve various social functions. Perhaps the most well-known and influential study of folk taxonomies is Émile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life". A more recent treatment of folk taxonomies (including the results of several decades of empirical research) and the discussion of their relation to the scientific taxonomy can be found in Scott Atran's "Cognitive Foundations of Natural History." Folk taxonomies of organisms have been found in large part to agree with scientific classification, at least for the larger and more obvious species, which means that it is not the case that folk taxonomies are based purely on utilitarian characteristics.


title: Taxonomy

text: In the seventeenth century the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, following the work of the thirteenth-century Majorcan philosopher Ramon Llull on his "Ars generalis ultima", a system for procedurally generating concepts by combining a fixed set of ideas, sought to develop an alphabet of human thought. Leibniz intended his "characteristica universalis" to be an "algebra" capable of expressing all conceptual thought. The concept of creating such a "universal language" was frequently examined in the 17th century, also notably by the English philosopher John Wilkins in his work "An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language" (1668), from which the classification scheme in Roget's Thesaurus ultimately derives.


title: Taxonomy

text: Taxonomy in biology encompasses the description, identification, nomenclature, and classification of organisms. Uses of taxonomy include:


title: Taxonomy

text: Vegas et al. make a compelling case to advance the knowledge in the field of software engineering through the use of taxonomies. Similarly, Ore et al. provide a systematic methodology to approach taxonomy building in software engineering related topics.


title: Taxonomy

text: Several taxonomies have been proposed in software testing research to classify techniques, tools, concepts and artifacts. The following are some example taxonomies:


title: Taxonomy

text: Engström et al. suggest and evaluate the use of a taxonomy to bridge the communication between researchers and practitioners engaged in the area of software testing. They have also developed a web-based tool to facilitate and encourage the use of the taxonomy. The tool and its source code are available for public use.


title: Taxonomy

text: Citing inadequacies with current practices in listing authors of papers in medical research journals, Drummond Rennie and co-authors called in a 1997 article in "JAMA", the "Journal of the American Medical Association" for


title: Taxonomy

text: "a radical conceptual and systematic change, to reflect the realities of multiple authorship and to buttress accountability. We propose dropping the outmoded notion of author in favor of the more useful and realistic one of contributor."


title: Taxonomy

text: Since 2012, several major academic and scientific publishing bodies have mounted "Project CRediT" to develop a controlled vocabulary of contributor roles. Known as "CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy)", this is an example of a flat, non-hierarchical taxonomy; however, it does include an optional, broad classification of the degree of contribution: "lead", "equal" or "supporting". Amy Brand and co-authors summarise their intended outcome as:


title: Taxonomy

text: Identifying specific contributions to published research will lead to appropriate credit, fewer author disputes, and fewer disincentives to collaboration and the sharing of data and code.


title: Taxonomy

text: As of mid-2018, this taxonomy apparently restricts its scope to "research outputs", specifically journal articles; however, it does rather unusually "hope to … support identification of peer reviewers". (As such, it has not yet defined terms for such roles as editor or author of a chapter in a "book" of research results.) Version 1, established by the first Working Group in the (northern) autumn of 2014, identifies 14 specific contributor roles using the following defined terms:


title: Taxonomy

text: Reception has been mixed, with several major publishers and journals planning to have implemented CRediT by the end of 2018, whilst almost as many aren't persuaded of the need or value of using it. For example,


title: Taxonomy

text: The National Academy of Sciences has created a "TACS (Transparency in Author Contributions in Science)" webpage to list the journals that commit to setting authorship standards, defining responsibilities for corresponding authors, requiring ORCID iDs, and adopting the CRediT taxonomy.


title: Taxonomy

text: The taxonomy is an open standard conforming to the OpenStand principles, and is published under a Creative Commons licence.


title: Taxonomy

text: Websites with a well designed taxonomy or hierarchy are easily understood by users, due to the possibility of users developing a mental model of the site structure.


title: Taxonomy

text: Two of the predominant types of relationships in knowledge-representation systems are predication and the universally quantified conditional. Predication relationships express the notion that an individual entity is an example of a certain type (for example, "John is a bachelor"), while universally quantified conditionals express the notion that a type is a subtype of another type (for example, ""A dog is a mammal"", which means the same as ""All dogs are mammals"").


title: Taxonomy

text: The "has-a" relationship is quite different: an elephant "has" a trunk; a trunk is a part, not a subtype of elephant. The study of part-whole relationships is mereology.


title: Taxonomy

text: Taxonomies are often represented as "is-a" hierarchies where each level is more specific than the level above it (in mathematical language is "a subset of" the level above). For example, a basic biology taxonomy would have concepts such as "mammal", which is a subset of "animal", and "dogs" and "cats", which are subsets of "mammal". This kind of taxonomy is called an is-a model because the specific objects are considered as instances of a concept. For example, "Fido" is-an instance of the concept "dog" and "Fluffy" is-a "cat".<br>


title: Taxonomy

text: In linguistics, is-a relations are called hyponymy. When one word describes a category, but another describe some subset of that category, the larger term is called a "hypernym" with respect to the smaller, and the smaller is called a "hyponym" with respect to the larger. Such a hyponym, in turn, may have further subcategories for which it is a hypernym. In the simple biology example, "dog" is a hypernym with respect to its subcategory "collie", which in turn is a hypernym with respect to "Fido" which is one of its hyponyms. Typically, however, "hypernym" is used to refer to subcategories rather than single individuals.


title: Taxonomy

text: Researchers reported that large populations consistently develop highly similar category systems. This may be relevant to lexical aspects of large communication networks and cultures such as folksonomies and language or human communication, and sense-making in general.


title: History of Portugal

text: The history of Portugal can be traced from circa 400,000 years ago, when the region of present-day Portugal was inhabited by Homo heidelbergensis.


title: History of Portugal

text: The Roman invasion in the 3rd century BC lasted several centuries, and developed the Roman provinces of Lusitania in the south and Gallaecia in the north. Following the fall of Rome, Germanic tribes controlled the territory between the 5th and 8th centuries, including the Kingdom of the Suebi centred in Braga and the Visigothic Kingdom in the south.


title: History of Portugal

text: The 711–716 invasion by the Islamic Umayyad Caliphate conquered the Visigoth Kingdom and founded the Islamic State of Al-Andalus, gradually advancing through Iberia. In 1095, Portugal broke away from the Kingdom of Galicia. Henry's son Afonso Henriques proclaimed himself king of Portugal in 1139. The Algarve (the southernmost province in Portugal) conquered from the Moors in 1249, and in 1255 Lisbon became the capital. Portugal's land boundaries have remained almost unchanged since then. During the reign of King John I, the Portuguese defeated the Castilians in a war over the throne (1385) and established a political alliance with England (by the Treaty of Windsor in 1386).


title: History of Portugal

text: From the late Middle Ages, in the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal ascended to the status of a world power during Europe's "Age of Discovery" as it built up a vast empire. Signs of military decline began with the Battle of Alcácer Quibir in Morocco in 1578, this defeat led to the death of King Sebastian and the imprisonment of much of the high nobility, which had to be ransomed at great cost. This eventually led to a small interruption in Portugal's 800 year old independence by way of a 60-year dynastic union with Spain between 1580 and the beginning of the Portuguese Restoration War led by John IV in 1640. Spain's disastrous defeat in its attempt to conquer England in 1588 by means of the Invincible Armada was also a factor, as Portugal had to contribute with ships for the invasion. Further setbacks included the destruction of much of its capital city in an earthquake in 1755, occupation during the Napoleonic Wars and the loss of its largest colony, Brazil, in 1822. From the middle of the 19th century to the late 1950s, nearly two million Portuguese left Portugal to live in Brazil and the United States.


title: History of Portugal

text: In 1910, a revolution deposed the monarchy. A military coup in 1926 installed a dictatorship that remained until another coup in 1974. The new government instituted sweeping democratic reforms and granted independence to all of Portugal's African colonies in 1975. Portugal is a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). It entered the European Economic Community (now the European Union) in 1986.


title: History of Portugal

text: The word Portugal derives from the Roman-Celtic place name Portus Cale. Cale or Cailleach was the name of a Celtic deity and the name of an early settlement located at the mouth of the Douro River (present-day Vila Nova de Gaia), which flows into the Atlantic Ocean in the north of what is now Portugal. Around 200 BC, the Romans took the Iberian Peninsula from the Carthaginians during the Second Punic War, and in the process conquered Cale and renamed it "Portus Cale" ("Port of Cale"). During the Middle Ages, the region around "Portus Cale" became known by the Suebi and Visigoths as Portucale.


title: History of Portugal

text: The name "Portucale" evolved into Portugale during the 7th and 8th centuries, and by the 9th century, that term was used extensively to refer to the region between the rivers Douro and Minho, the Minho flowing along what would become the northern Portugal–Spain border. By the 11th and 12th centuries, "Portugale" was already referred to as Portugal.


title: History of Portugal

text: The etymology of "Cale" points to Cale being a Celtic name, like many others found in the region. The word "cale" or "cala" meant "port", an "inlet" or "harbour", referring to an older Celtic harbour. Today's Gaelic word for harbour is still "cala". Some argue it is the stem of Gallaecia, again of Celtic derivation. Another theory claims it derives from the word "Caladunum".


title: History of Portugal

text: The region of present-day Portugal has been inhabited by humans since circa 400,000 years ago, when Homo heidelbergensis entered the area. The oldest human fossil found in Portugal is the 400,000-year-old "Aroeira 3" "H. Heidelbergensis" skull discovered in the Cave of Aroeira in 2014. Later Neanderthals roamed the northern Iberian peninsula and a tooth has been found at Nova da Columbeira cave in Estremadura. Homo sapiens sapiens arrived in Portugal around 35,000 years ago and spread rapidly throughout the country.


title: History of Portugal

text: Pre-Celtic tribes inhabited Portugal leaving a remarkable cultural footprint. The Cynetes developed a written language, leaving many stelae, which are mainly found in the south of Portugal.


title: History of Portugal

text: Early in the first millennium BC, several waves of Celts invaded Portugal from Central Europe and intermarried with the local populations to form several different ethnic groups, with many tribes. The Celtic presence in Portugal is traceable, in broad outline, through archaeological and linguistic evidence. They dominated much of northern and central Portugal; but in the south, they were unable to establish their stronghold, which retained its non-Indo-European character until the Roman conquest. In southern Portugal, some small, semi-permanent commercial coastal settlements were also founded by Phoenician-Carthaginians.


title: History of Portugal

text: Numerous pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula inhabited the territory when a Roman invasion occurred in the 3rd century BC. The Romanization of Hispania took several centuries. The Roman provinces that covered present-day Portugal were Lusitania in the south and Gallaecia in the north.


title: History of Portugal

text: Numerous Roman sites are scattered around present-day Portugal. Some of the urban remains are quite large, such as Conímbriga and Miróbriga. Several works of engineering, such as baths, temples, bridges, roads, circuses, theatres, and layman's homes are preserved throughout the country. Coins, sarcophagi, and ceramics are also numerous.


title: History of Portugal

text: Following the fall of Rome, the Kingdom of the Suebi and the Visigothic Kingdom controlled the territory between the 5th and 8th centuries.


title: History of Portugal

text: Romanization began with the arrival of the Roman army in the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC during the Second Punic War against Carthage. The Romans sought to conquer Lusitania, a territory that included all of modern Portugal south of the Douro river and Spanish Extremadura, with its capital at Emerita Augusta (now Mérida).


title: History of Portugal

text: Mining was the primary factor that made the Romans interested in conquering the region: one of Rome's strategic objectives was to cut off Carthaginian access to the Iberian copper, tin, gold, and silver mines. The Romans intensely exploited the Aljustrel (Vipasca) and Santo Domingo mines in the Iberian Pyrite Belt which extends to Seville.


title: History of Portugal

text: While the south of what is now Portugal was relatively easily occupied by the Romans, the conquest of the north was achieved only with difficulty due to resistance from Serra da Estrela by Celts and Lusitanians led by Viriatus, who managed to resist Roman expansion for years. Viriatus, a shepherd from Serra da Estrela who was expert in guerrilla tactics, waged relentless war against the Romans, defeating several successive Roman generals, until he was assassinated in 140 BC by traitors bought by the Romans. Viriatus has long been hailed as the first truly heroic figure in proto-Portuguese history. Nonetheless, he was responsible for raids into the more settled Romanized parts of Southern Portugal and Lusitania that involved the victimization of the inhabitants.


title: History of Portugal

text: The conquest of the Iberian Peninsula was complete two centuries after the Roman arrival, when they defeated the remaining Cantabri, Astures and Gallaeci in the Cantabrian Wars in the time of Emperor Augustus (19 BC). In 74 AD, Vespasian granted Latin Rights to most municipalities of Lusitania. In 212 AD, the Constitutio Antoniniana gave Roman citizenship to all free subjects of the empire and, at the end of the century, the emperor Diocletian founded the province of Gallaecia, which included modern-day northern Portugal, with its capital at Bracara Augusta (now Braga). As well as mining, the Romans also developed agriculture, on some of the best agricultural land in the empire. In what is now Alentejo, vines and cereals were cultivated, and fishing was intensively pursued in the coastal belt of the Algarve, Póvoa de Varzim, Matosinhos, Troia and the coast of Lisbon, for the manufacture of garum that was exported by Roman trade routes to the entire empire. Business transactions were facilitated by coinage and the construction of an extensive road network, bridges and aqueducts, such as Trajan's bridge in Aquae Flaviae (now Chaves).


title: History of Portugal

text: Roman rule brought geographical mobility to the inhabitants of Portugal and increased their interaction with the rest of the world as well as internally. Soldiers often served in different regions and eventually settled far from their birthplace, while the development of mining attracted migration into the mining areas. The Romans founded numerous cities, such as Olisipo (Lisbon), Bracara Augusta (Braga), Aeminium (Coimbra) and Pax Julia (Beja), and left important cultural legacies in what is now Portugal. Vulgar Latin (the basis of the Portuguese language) became the dominant language of the region, and Christianity spread throughout Lusitania from the third century.


title: History of Portugal

text: In 409, with the decline of the Roman Empire, the Iberian Peninsula was occupied by Germanic tribes that the Romans referred to as barbarians. In 411, with a federation contract with Emperor Honorius, many of these people settled in Hispania. An important group was made up of the Suebi and Vandals in Gallaecia, who founded a Suebi Kingdom with its capital in Braga. They came to dominate Aeminium (Coimbra) as well, and there were Visigoths to the south.


title: History of Portugal

text: The Suebi and the Visigoths were the Germanic tribes who had the most lasting presence in the territories corresponding to modern Portugal. As elsewhere in Western Europe, there was a sharp decline in urban life during the Dark Ages.


title: History of Portugal

text: Roman institutions disappeared in the wake of the Germanic invasions with the exception of ecclesiastical organizations, which were fostered by the Suebi in the fifth century and adopted by the Visigoths afterwards. Although the Suebi and Visigoths were initially followers of Arianism and Priscillianism, they adopted Catholicism from the local inhabitants. St. Martin of Braga was a particularly influential evangelist at this time.


title: History of Portugal

text: In 429, the Visigoths moved south to expel the Alans and Vandals and founded a kingdom with its capital in Toledo. From 470, conflict between the Suebi and Visigoths increased. In 585, the Visigothic King Liuvigild conquered Braga and annexed Gallaecia. From that time, the Iberian Peninsula was unified under a Visigothic Kingdom.