No-show By Onassis Heiress Upsets Greeks

The heiress Athina Onassis de Miranda has caused huge controversy in Athens by failing to attend a press conference, pronounce a word in Greek or even hand out cups to the winners of an equestrian event held in her mother's memory.

Making her second visit to Athens in five years, the last surviving member of the shipping dynasty has been criticized for being herself: low-key and media-shy.

Few Greeks could understand how the 22-year-old could spend nearly a week in Greece without visiting Scorpios, the Ionian island where her mother Christina was buried after her death in 1988. The heiress's failure to appear in public to publicize an international horse show in Christina's memory that she has backed was greeted with disbelief.

"From the day she arrived we had our first surprise," wrote the Sunday Espresso. "While many expected her to accompany her husband [the Brazilian equestrian Alvaro Alfonso de Miranda Neto] to the press conference, she shone through her failure to even be there."

Ms Onassis de Miranda, who was raised by Lake Geneva with her three half-siblings, has avoided Greece since her mother's death in Buenos Aires. Years of legal tussles between her father, Thierry Roussel, and the Athenian trustees of her estate are believed to have estranged her further. At the age of 10, she revealed in a handwritten will that she intended to give her entire fortune away. But when she came into her $1.3bn inheritance at the age of 21, Greeks had hoped she would change. In 2004, there was speculation that the talented equestrian would represent Greece in the Athens Olympics.

Far from embracing the country of her forefathers, however, Ms Onassis de Miranda has shunned it in favor of a cloistered life with her husband, hopscotching between Brussels and Sao Paolo.

"In the last five years she has spent precisely two days in Greece," Alexis Mantheakis, the family's former spokesman. "Holding an event here in memory of her mother is nice, but what would make the Greek people happy is if she went to Scorpios every now and then and lit a candle for her mother, grandfather and other relatives who are buried there."

Despite retaining servants on the island, where her grandfather Aristotle married Jackie Kennedy, the heiress has not visited the once fabled get-away since 1998.

This year Athina shocked Greeks by failing to attend the funeral of Kalliroe Patronicola, her favorite aunt and last surviving sister of Aristotle Onassis, in Athens. Later she sold her mother's Swiss chalet in St Moritz for €20m and placed an ad in Greek newspapers for the sale of the Athenian site where the House of Onassis had once lived in splendor.

"Her whole attitude is very strange and very sad," said one old family friend, requesting anonymity. "It is as if she wants nothing to do with her past and Greece."