This past January she joined an Athenian equestrian club called Avlona in the hope of riding in international competitions, including the 2008 Olympics, in Beijing, wearing the blue and white of the Greek flag. In the fall of 2003 she renewed the Greek passport her mother had obtained for her. On this issue, too, Athina has made a complete about-face. (1.2) … She will learn the Greek language so as to speak it fluently.” She made a statement in which she stipulated, according to a court report, that she felt “great aversion to anything that is Greek, even though she knows that her mother, her grandfather and her fortune come from Greece.” This extraordinary declaration, clearly encouraged by her father, was in defiance of certain specifications in the protocol that he had signed when he took custody of the three-year-old: “(1.1) As agreed with Christina Onassis when she was alive, Athina will be reared in the Orthodox religion. In 1999, as a timorous 14-year-old, Athina went to a court for minors in Oberengadin, Switzerland, with her father and renounced everything related to her grandfather’s heritage. Athina’s confrontation with her father and her newfound assertiveness are not the only surprising developments in the sole surviving heir of Aristotle Onassis, the Anatolian tycoon who revolutionized the shipping industry and captured the hearts of both opera diva Maria Callas and Jacqueline Kennedy.

Books by nicholas gage