Pavlos of Greece moves to Athens for good: "It's my homeland," says the king's son, in a country that abolished the monarchy in 1974

Pavlos of Greece said it without diplomatic detours: "It's my homeland and I live here permanently." The eldest son of Greece's last king, Constantine, born in Greece, is closing a story his family spent decades writing outside the country.

The photos are from the end of September. Pavlos, his wife Marie-Chantal and his mother, Queen Anne-Marie, at lunch and in a bookshop in Athens' Kolonaki district. Nothing spectacular - an ordinary family outing. But that's exactly the point: a family that spent decades living in London and New York now wants to look like part of everyday Athenian life.

The history is well known and easy to understand in the Balkans. Constantine left Greece in December 1967, after a failed counter-coup against the junta of Georgios Papadopoulos, which had seized power in a coup in April that year. In 1974 the Greeks abolished the monarchy in a referendum. The former king only came back to live in the country in 2013, and died in January 2023.

Four members of the family now live in Athens: two of Anne-Marie's sons and their wives. Prince Nikolaos is there with his second wife Chrysi, whose father Georgios Vardinogiannis recently died aged 90. The other children, Alexia, Theodora and Philippos, live abroad. In 2002 Pavlos and Marie-Chantal moved from New York to London, where the king and queen were living at the time - and now the road leads the other way.

Marie-Chantal joined the family with the 1995 wedding, and her mother-in-law's first public gesture was the tiara she lent her for the day. "I came into a very close family... I was very lucky to be accepted," she has said. The couple have five children and in July celebrated 31 years of marriage.

Anne-Marie turned 80 in August. Pavlos described her at the time as "the kindest, gentlest and most special person". Warm, family-minded, no politics - on paper, at least. But royal families rarely return out of nostalgia alone.

Greece is a republic and that decision isn't on the table. Still, when the head of a former royal house says "it's my homeland", the question asks itself: how easy is it for a family to stop being royal - and how easy is it for a country to stop seeing it as such? The Balkans know this script: in Belgrade, too, the Karađorđević family still lives in the White Palace today.