The announcement arrived the way the best royal news often does now, quietly, on a Tuesday, with no swell of anticipation preceding it. On September 1, the office of the former Royal Family of Greece confirmed that Prince Philippos and Princess Nina had become parents for the first time, welcoming a son, Kimon Thomas Konstantinos, born on July 27 in the United States. The child had already lived several weeks of his life before the world learned he existed, a detail that says everything about how this particular couple has chosen to move through public life: privately, deliberately, on their own schedule.
That Nina and Philippos had been expecting was itself a surprise. There had been no pregnancy announcement, no carefully lit maternity imagery, none of the choreography that has come to define modern royal parenthood. Kimon was born via surrogacy, and in their statement the couple was unusually direct in their gratitude. They thanked the surrogate mother and her family for making their son’s arrival possible, and extended their appreciation to the medical staff and specialists whose care, as they put it, accompanied them throughout the journey. It is a candor that feels of the moment, arriving as families of every kind speak more openly about the paths they take to parenthood.
The baby’s name is a quiet act of devotion in three parts. Kimon roots him in Greece. Thomas honors Nina’s father, the aviation entrepreneur Thomas Flohr, founder of VistaJet. And Konstantinos carries the memory of Philippos’ late father, Constantine II, the last king of Greece, who died in 2023. To name a child for a lost father is among the oldest gestures of continuity, and here it threads a new life directly into a lineage that has weathered exile, the loss of a throne, and, only in 2024, the reinstatement of the family’s Greek citizenship under the surname De Grèce.
For those who have followed Nina’s ascent, the news lands as another chapter in a life she has built with striking intention. Long before she became Princess Nina of Greece and Denmark, she was known as the founder and creative director of Kisawa Sanctuary, the pioneering resort she opened in 2017 on Benguerra Island in Mozambique’s Bazaruto Archipelago. Spread across some 300 hectares of coastal forest and beach, Kisawa was conceived, in her own framing, around a word that means unbreakable, a name chosen to describe the bond between people and place. The daughter of Thomas Flohr and Katharina Flohr, a former founding editor of Russian Vogue, Nina arrived at hospitality with an inherited fluency in design and a conservationist’s conscience. She has since paired the resort with the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies, a marine research facility, turning a luxury project into something closer to a stewardship.
Philippos, the youngest of King Constantine and Queen Anne-Marie’s five children and one of Princess Diana’s godchildren, proposed on the Greek island of Ithaca in the summer of 2020. What followed was a wedding told in movements rather than a single day. The couple married civilly in St. Moritz that December, in a ceremony so pared down by the pandemic that only their two fathers attended, and Nina marked it on Instagram simply as having just married, civilly. A low-key celebration in Cambridge followed the next spring, hosted by the Vogue writer Alice Naylor-Leyland. Then, in October 2021, came the grand religious ceremony at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens, where Nina walked the aisle in a Chanel gown and the diamond Corsage Tiara.
Now, less than four months shy of their sixth anniversary, that carefully constructed private world has expanded by one. The couple say they are savoring these first precious weeks with their son, beginning, together, what they describe as a new chapter. For a family whose story has so often been shaped by forces beyond its control, there is something quietly powerful in a beginning entirely of their own making.
