In the winter of 1973, Alexander Onassis, the only son and heir of the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, climbed aboard his personal amphibious aircraft at Hellenikon International Airport in Athens. With him were two pilots, one the man he was evaluating for a position with his airline. The plan was simple: practice amphibious landings between the islands of Aegina and Poros. The plane lifted off from the runway at three in the afternoon.
Fifteen seconds later, the right wing dropped, and the aircraft lost control. When it crashed, all three men aboard were seriously injured. Alexander was rushed to a hospital in Athens, and his father, then in New York, collapsed from shock upon hearing the news. Aristotle arrived the following day with his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and a neurosurgeon.
From Switzerland came his ex-wife, Athina, with her new husband, Stavros Niarchos, who had once been Aristotle’s fiercest rival. The image of these two rivals standing vigil over Alexander’s bed captured the surreal tragedy of the moment. But the experts brought in from London delivered devastating news: there was no chance of survival. At seven in the evening on January 23, 1973, twenty-seven hours after the crash, Alexander died from a brain hemorrhage.
He was twenty-four years old. The official investigation determined that the crash resulted from reversed aileron connecting cables, a mechanical error of human negligence, not sabotage. Aristotle refused to accept this. Within a month, manslaughter proceedings were initiated against one of the pilots.
Six people were eventually charged, and in December 1974, Aristotle took out a paid advertisement offering one million dollars to anyone who could prove his son’s death was deliberate. He suspected the CIA, the leader of the Greek military junta, and even his rival Niarchos. His grief hardened into obsession. All charges were eventually dropped, and in 1978 the pilot was awarded damages by Olympic Airways.
The official story remained mechanical failure. For Aristotle, the explanation changed nothing. His heir was gone in fifteen seconds of flight. The story of that crash, and of the dynasty that crumbled in its wake, began decades earlier and far from Athens.
Aristotle Onassis arrived in Buenos Aires in 1923 with two hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket and a Nansen passport, the document of a refugee. He had fled the burning of Smyrna, where he lost three uncles, an aunt, her husband, and their daughter, among the hundreds of Christians who died seeking shelter in a church. The Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922 took from his family not only lives but their home and everything they had built. Young Aristotle learned early that wealth could vanish overnight.
Only by climbing higher than everyone else could he stay above the flames. He began as a telephone operator, then went into business importing English and Turkish tobacco to Argentina. That fortune became the foundation for his first shipping company. He expanded to New York, bought war surplus vessels at bargain prices after the Second World War, and built a fleet of more than seventy ships that moved oil, grain, and goods across oceans.
In 1946 he married Athina Livanos, merging with the shipping dynasty of her father, Stavros Livanos. The marriage produced two children: Alexander, born in 1948, and Christina, born in 1950. By the early 1960s, Aristotle was known as one of the wealthiest men on Earth. He purchased the private island of Skorpios, imported two hundred varieties of trees, brought sand from another island to create beaches, and built a family compound with a helipad and a small marina for his yacht.
He created Olympic Airways in 1957. Every venture multiplied his fortune. His younger sister, Calli Patronicola, represented a quieter branch of the family. An artist who painted porcelain, she purchased a villa in Lagoni, thirty kilometers from Athens, on five acres of beachfront overlooking the Saronic Gulf.
The property became a sanctuary, a place where the scattered pieces of the Onassis empire could occasionally reunite. Its white chapel saw christenings and celebrations, and its gardens sprawled with the kind of landscaping that required an army of caretakers. When Calli’s daughter Marilena later inherited it, she maintained it with the same care. It was a touchstone, a reminder that there was still a place in Greece where the family belonged.
But belonging requires a family to belong to. The cracks began to show in 1960, when Aristotle and Athina’s marriage collapsed over his open affair with the opera singer Maria Callas. Their children, Alexander and Christina, watched their mother’s humiliation become public spectacle. Christina would later describe growing up with immense wealth but minimal attention.
Servants raised her while her parents pursued separate lives. Alexander threw himself into aviation, finding a freedom he couldn’t find anywhere else. Both developed a wariness around relationships. The instability created patterns that would define their entire lives.
Aristotle’s next move shocked even those accustomed to his boldness. In October 1968 he married Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of the slain American president, on his private island of Skorpios. The union was transactional: Jackie sought security, Aristotle sought the ultimate status symbol. For Alexander and Christina, the marriage represented betrayal.
Neither warmed to their stepmother, though they remained friendly with her children. The marriage created additional strain on family dynamics already stretched thin. The family fractured further when Athina married Stavros Niarchos, Aristotle’s fiercest business rival and the widower of her own sister. At the villa in Lagoni, Calli maintained her distance from the chaos, painting her porcelain and tending her gardens, providing a haven for family members who needed escape.
Young Christina sometimes visited, playing in the pool, finding brief moments of normalcy that would later feel heartbreaking given what came next. Alexander’s death was the catastrophe from which the family would never recover. Aristotle had been grooming him to take over the empire. Now, bereft, he turned to Christina.
She was twenty-two years old, in Brazil when she received the news, and had become the last surviving child of Aristotle Onassis. He brought her to New York, trained her in the operations of the shipping empire, and she showed a sharp mind for finance that surprised the old men who had worked for her father. But within two years she buried her brother and her mother. Athina died in 1974 from what was officially called a heart attack.
The truth emerged later: pulmonary edema caused by an overdose of barbiturates. On March 15, 1975, Aristotle Onassis died in Paris at the age of sixty-nine. He had never recovered from the loss of his son. Christina, twenty-four years old, received 55 percent of his fortune, estimated at five hundred million dollars.
Jackie Kennedy Onassis received twenty-six million from the estate. Christina immediately renounced her American citizenship. When her father died, she reportedly said, “I am all alone in the world now. ” She became one of the wealthiest women in the world and the sole proprietor of the family shipping empire.
Her romantic life became tabloid fodder. A first marriage to a Los Angeles real estate broker ended after nine months, a union her father had opposed violently enough to cut off her trust fund. Christina attempted to end her life during that marriage. A second marriage, to the heir of another prominent Greek family, lasted fourteen months.
A third, to a Russian shipping agent, ended the following year. Each failure deepened her depression. Diagnosed with clinical depression at thirty, she was prescribed barbiturates, amphetamines, and sleeping pills, and developed addictions to all of them. Her weight fluctuated wildly, and the media documented every change.
Her fourth marriage, to the French pharmaceutical heir Thierry Roussel, produced a daughter, Athina, born on January 29, 1985. For a brief period, Christina seemed to find stability. But Roussel was already involved with another woman, with whom he fathered two children during the marriage. When Christina discovered the betrayal, she divorced him.
She poured her love into her daughter, creating a suite decorated with gold leaf, filling it with a diamond-studded rocking horse and a miniature Rolls-Royce. It was the kind of excess that made good headlines but questionable parenting. In November 1988, Christina was visiting friends in Argentina, considering a new life there with Athina, away from the European tabloids. On the morning of November 19, her maid found her body in the bathtub of the mansion where she had been staying.
She was thirty-seven. The initial autopsy found no evidence of foul play, and the official cause of death was listed as a heart attack caused by acute pulmonary edema. But further toxicology tests revealed large quantities of barbiturates in her system. Whether she intended to end her life remained unclear.
Some close to her insisted she had seemed happy. Others could not rule out the possibility given her history. What was certain was that Christina Onassis died the same way her mother had died: pulmonary edema caused by barbiturates. She was buried on Skorpios alongside her father and brother.
Christina left behind a three-year-old daughter, Athina, the sole surviving descendant of Aristotle Onassis, heir to an estate worth an estimated two hundred and fifty million dollars. Raised by her father and his partner, deliberately shielded from her heritage, she grew up in Switzerland, the outsider in her own household, impossibly wealthy and disconnected from the dynasty that created that wealth. She became an accomplished equestrian, finding in horses an identity independent of the family name. At thirteen, she reportedly said she felt great aversion to anything Greek.
She blamed the problems on the Onassis name. In 2005, Athina married a Brazilian showjumper. Calli Patronicola sent a porcelain dinner service she had painted herself as a wedding gift. After Calli’s death in 2006, the villa passed to her daughter Marilena.
But Athina had cut her ties with Greece entirely. She sold Skorpios, the private island where three generations were buried, in 2013 for a hundred and fifty-three million dollars, violating her grandfather’s will, which had stated the island should remain in family hands as long as they could afford its maintenance. She had built a life in the Netherlands. Greece held nothing for her.
The villa in Lagoni became the last Onassis property in Greek hands. It was sold by Marilena to a shipowner, who then sold it to a Saudi tycoon for fifteen million euros. The property had undergone extensive renovations: state-of-the-art security, climate control, modern kitchens. The white chapel still stood, its paint fresh.
The pool had been resurfaced. But no Onassis would ever live there again. The sale marked the end of the Onassis presence in Greece. No properties, no family members, no continuing dynasty, just graves on an island now owned by a Russian oligarch’s daughter, being developed into a luxury resort.
What remains of the empire exists primarily in institutions. The Alexander S. Onassis Foundation continues to operate, offering prizes and scholarships to Greek students. Athina Onassis lives quietly out of the public eye, no longer maintaining any connection to Greece beyond the distant genetic fact of her ancestry.
The tragedy of the Lagani villa isn’t that it was sold. The tragedy is that it had to be sold because no one from the family wanted it. No one wanted the memories it contained, the heritage it represented, the connection to a dynasty that had brought nothing but pain to those who bore its name. Aristotle Onassis fled burning Smyrna with nothing and built everything.
Two generations later, his granddaughter fled everything he built and chose nothing. The mansion passed into other hands, not because the family couldn’t afford to keep it, but because there was no family left who wanted to.