The Royal House of the Netherlands has announced new dates for King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima’s State Visit to Greece.
The visit has been postponed twice in the past year. Initially, the royals were supposed to be in Greece in late 2021, but the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic forced plans to be changed.
The visit was then supposed to occur in March, but the outbreak of the war in Ukraine prompted another last-minute postponement.
The RVD (Government Information Service) has announced that the King and Queen will travel to Greece between the 31st of October and the 2nd of November.
The visit will be carried out at the invitation of the Greek president, Ms Katerina Sakellaropoulou, and will focus on issues such as international cooperation (both countries are NATO members) and migrations.
The royal couple will visit Athens and Thessaloniki, the country’s second-largest city on the Thermaic Gulf and one of the biggest ports in Eastern Europe.
Further details of the visit’s schedule were not included in this latest press release and will be announced in due course.
This will probably be the first flight for King Willem-Alexander. He has recently had to renounce to the planned economic mission to the United States due to recovery from pneumonia that would be aggravated by aerial travel.
Queen Máxima is currently in northern California and will travel to Texas before going home; given her husband’s absence, she is now leading the delegation of state authorities and private business delegates travelling in the US.
Despite their geographic and cultural differences, the Netherlands and Greece share excellent diplomatic relations, which probably come partially from being two waterfront nations and therefore being at the forefront of maritime industries, such as commerce and energy production.
This will be the King and Queen’s first time back in Greece after the holiday they had to cut short in October 2020 due to mounting criticism for violating stay-at-home orders during the second wave of the pandemic.
