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21. 10. 11. - 08:00

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21. 10. 11. - 08:00

From Riches to Rags

She looks like any old bag lady scavenging for cast-offs in the rubbish as the world looks the other way.

But this is no ordinary woman - she is Olga Onassis, 90, a woman linked by marriage to one of the richest dynasties in the world.

She has now fallen, like her country, on desperate times.

She is a regular at a church soup kitchen in the Greek capital Athens and roots around in the overflowing garbage containers of the city for clothes.

German newspaper Bild spoke with her this week as her debt ridden nation lurched into violence and chaos once more.

Olga Onassis' husband Georgios was the cousin of Aristotle Onassis, the fabulously wealth Greek shipping tycoon who married President John F. Kennedy's widow Jackie in 1968.

Their's was a life of splendour and opulence before his death in 1975. But Olga has not been paid anything from the family in over six years.

She told Bild; "I get nothing more from the family.  I survive on one pension only and that was cut to 300 euros a month because of the crisis.  I cannot believe what has happened to my country."

A report dating back to 2004 on the Ekathimerini Greek news website said Athina Roussel, the granddaughter of Aristotle who inherited around two billion pounds when her mother Christina died in 1988, cut off Olga's allowance in a dispute with Swiss authorities.

On January 29, 2003 Athina turned 18 but Switzerland - she has a Swiss passport and the Onassis fortune was banked there - decided to delay her getting her hands on it for five years, judging her to be "too young."

Ekathimerini stated; " The fact is that Athina was forced to cut off small allowances that Aristotle Onassis used to give the wives of his cousins Aris and Giorgos Onassis, and which Christina had kept up, as did Athina.

"Olga Onassis went to the Hotel Grande Bretagne to ask Athina why she had stopped sending the annual sum of $9,000 U.S. when the heiress spent 24 hours there during a mysterious trip, but she did not manage to see her."

Bild said Olga still cut an "elegant figure" despite her reduced circumstances - but, like her nation, sees no way out of the hard times that have descended on Greece.

German Herald

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