With their hasty departure in 1967, King Constantine II and his family left behind a royal palace containing all their belongings, from luxury cars and ballroom gowns to children’s toys and medicine boxes.

For almost 40 years the Palace of Tatoi has been abandoned as successive Greek governments repudiated their country’s deposed monarchy. The personal effects of the Royal Family remain scattered around the mildewed and rat-infested rooms, where most of the furniture and wall paintings have been looted or vandalised.

Now the Greek Culture Ministry has pledged to fund restoration work after an inspection by officials revealed its precarious state. Petros Tatoulis, the deputy minister for culture, has ordered work on cataloguing the hundreds of items in the palace and its 24 ancillary buildings nestling in 10,000 acres of a wooded vale at Tatoi, 15 miles northwest of Athens. "Restoring the place is going to take a long time and cost a lot of money," he said. "We can’t do it from one day to the next."

The tombs of the Greek Royal Family, lying in a pine wood by a disused chapel, have been vandalised. They include the graves of the Duke of Edinburgh’s parents.

This week Culture Ministry employees prised open the palace doors to examine the state of the rooms. Some are filled with sealed trunks that the young and inexperienced King did not have time to take with him when he was forced to flee Greece after leading an abortive counter-coup against the far-right colonels’ regime in December 1967.

In a garage, covered with dust and fallen plaster, is Constantine’s 1965 MG sports car, side by side with a dark blue Rolls-Royce used by his father, King Paul, who died in 1964. There is even a rusting, peeling 19th-century landau carriage, a relic from when the palace was built in 1873.

The personal effects still intact include dolls and other toys, medicine boxes with pills in them, and evening gowns made for Queen Anne-Marie. Two closets are bursting with collections of ties and shoes. A charred log rests in the master bedroom fireplace.

The Royal Family now owns none of this. In 1994 a decree by the viciously anti-royal Socialist Government of the time stripped Constantine of all the estate and its contents, and his Greek citizenship. He has visited the site three times in recent years but has not been allowed to take anything away.

A royal spokesman told The Times: "Only the Royal Family can know the sentimental value of what’s in there. By law, it all belongs to the people, whatever that means. The main things he is concerned about are the collapsing roof and the neglected chapels and tombs."

During the Olympic Games last year, Constantine told The Times that he had no interest in trying to reclaim the Tatoi property. He visibly is more relaxed on his now-frequent Greek visits as a conservative government has been in place for a year and a half.

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