Achillion is a palace built in Corfu by Empress ( German : Kaiserin) of Austria, also known as Sissi after a suggestion by Austrian Consul Alexander von Watzberg.
Sissi was a woman obsessed with beauty and very powerful but tragically vulnerable since the loss of her only son, Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria in the Mayerling affair in 1889. A year later in 1890 she built a summer palace in the region of Gastouri (Γαστούρι), now the municipality of Achilleion , about ten kilometres to the south of the city of Corfu.
The palace was designed with the mythical hero Achilles as its central theme . Sissi spoke Greek better than any of the Greek queens that were her contemporaries and she expressed a desire to further immerse herself in the Greek culture. Like every other European royal, she had some Byzantine emperors among her distant ancestors.
Licence Number: 08.29.E.61.00.00494.01