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Go to www.spotator.com.com.com.com. Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. I'm Damien Thompson.

This is an earlier than I anticipated episode for the sad reason that the Duke of

Edinburgh has died. A fascinating man in so many respects, and from a religious point of view,

interesting because he was born baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church, though he later left

to become an Anglican when he married the Queen. He was the grandson of a King of Greece.

He didn't have a drop of Greek blood in his veins.

He belonged to the House of Luxburg,

the House of Schleshevik-Holstein-Sonderberg-Luksburg,

which has supplied Europe with many a monarch,

including the Queen of Denmark, the King of Norway, and of course the Greek royal

family. I was always very impressed by Prince Philip and thought he was hugely underrated intellectually

because of his deliberately bluff and laconic manner. He did take a strong interest in Christianity

because we know that in the early 1980s he engages some dialogues with the then Dean of Windsor, Michael Mann,

and in later years one heard from time to time that he was rediscovering his Orthodox faith.

It should be a slightly odd thing for him to do given that as far as I can work out, he was never really reared in the Orthodox faith.

The Glouk's, like a number of other royal families,

had to convert to orthodoxy in order to get the crown,

...