Madonna to buy Onassis Island?
Perhaps the rumours that Madonna was in Greece this week is true after all. This story has made the Sunday papers today.
Madonna has shown an interest in buying the Greek island of Skorpios where the late Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis seduced opera diva Maria Callas and America’s former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, whom he subsequently married.
The singer, who has been looking for a holiday hideaway, has made several private visits to the Ionian island, which is on the market for GBP 195million.
It has been put up for sale by Aristotle’s granddaughter Athina, who became the richest teenager in the world last year when she inherited GBP 600million on her 18th birthday.
Even though her grandfather, who bought the island for GBP 6,500 in 1962, is buried there along with her mother and uncle, Athina has no love for its 3,000 acres, three villas, chapel and marina. She rarely visits and has decided to sell it because it fills her with unhappy memories of her family’s tragic dynasty.
Her grandfather died of a broken heart two years after his son Alexander was killed in a plane crash in 1973 aged just 25. Then her mother Christina died after taking an overdose in a bath in Buenos Aires when Athina was only three.
‘I want to forget the name Onassis – it is the cause of all the problems,’ Athina declared when she inherited the bulk of her fortune last year.
‘It is clear that Athina wants to sever her links with the Onassis name. She does not have a close affinity with Greece either,’ revealed an insider. Indeed Athina, who inherits the rest of her grandfather’s GBP 5billion estate when she reaches 21, speaks little Greek and spends much of her time in Sao Paolo with her exotic Brazilian boyfriend, Alvaro Alfonso de Miranda Neto.
Although Athina is keen to sell the island, whoever buys it has to agree to let her visit the family graves whenever she wishes.
‘She absolutely insists on that,’ added the friend.
Mail on Sunday