Achilleion Palace was created at Gastouri on Corfu for Empress Elisabeth of Austria, widely known as Sisi. After repeated visits to the island and the death of her son Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889, Elisabeth sought a private retreat shaped by her admiration for Greek language, poetry, and mythology. She acquired the former Villa Vraila estate and commissioned Italian architect Raffaele Caritto. Completed around 1890–91, the palace combined neoclassical, Pompeian, and Italianate elements within terraced gardens overlooking the Ionian Sea.

Elisabeth named the residence for Achilles, whose beauty, courage, isolation, and early death spoke to her personal imagination. Statues, paintings, inscriptions, colonnades, and interior decoration built a sustained mythological program. Ernst Herter’s Dying Achilles became the emotional centerpiece of the garden, showing the wounded hero at the moment of death rather than in triumph. The empress used Achilleion intermittently, walking, reading, studying Greek, and escaping court ceremony. Her assassination in Geneva in 1898 ended this intensely personal phase of the palace.

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany purchased Achilleion in 1907 and reinterpreted its symbolism. He added the monumental Victorious Achilles by sculptor Johannes Götz, presenting a martial hero unlike Elisabeth’s tragic figure. The gardens and buildings became a setting for imperial visits, diplomacy, archaeology, and display. Wilhelm also constructed a bridge and landing facilities connecting the estate more directly with the coast. His occupation ended with the First World War, when Allied forces used the palace as a military hospital and headquarters.

After the war, Achilleion passed to the Greek state under postwar settlement. It served educational, administrative, and charitable purposes, and parts of the property experienced occupation and damage during the Second World War. In the early 1960s the state leased it for a casino and museum, introducing tourism and entertainment into a former imperial residence. A casino later moved elsewhere, while the palace continued as a museum and venue. Film exposure, including its appearance in a James Bond production, strengthened its international popular image.

Modern conservation addresses painted interiors, sculpture, gardens, terraces, roofs, and the effects of heavy visitation. The palace is significant for the contrast between its two principal owners. Elisabeth shaped a refuge around melancholy, classical learning, and the vulnerable Achilles; Wilhelm turned the same estate toward imperial confidence and victory. Later hospital, state, casino, museum, and film uses added further meanings. Achilleion therefore records how modern European rulers appropriated antiquity for personal and political purposes on a Greek island with its own long history.