Tribe for Pacific island of Tanna despair their idol Prince Philip may never visit

London: Buckingham Palace may have announced his retirement from public life, but nearly 16,000 kilometres away a tiny community still hopes the Duke of Edinburgh will change his mind.

So remote is the village of Younanen that it has only now received word of the Duke's decision to retire.

It matters because inhabitants on the South Pacific island of Tanna revere him as the son of a local mountain god who will one day return to them.

The news has been greeted with despondency among the locals.

"Prince Philip has said one day he will come and visit us," Jack Malia, the village chief, told a Reuters reporter who reached Younanen on Saturday.

Holding one of several photographs of the Duke proudly displayed by the villager, including one from 1980 in a suit, holding a club they made and sent to him in London, he added: "We still believe that he will come but if he doesn't come, the pictures that I am holding ... it means nothing."

Each day, the villagers pray to the Duke, asking for his blessings on the banana and yam crops that sustain their poor community.

"If he comes one day, the people will not be poor, there will be no sickness, no debt and the garden will be growing very well," said Mr Malia.

Local legend tells of the pale-skinned son of the mountain god who ventured across the seas in search of a rich and powerful woman to marry.

Anthropologists believe the Duke of Edinburgh became linked to the legend in the '60s when Vanuatu was an Anglo-French colony, known as the New Hebrides. It is now an island nation. Villagers at the time were likely to have seen portraits of the Duke and the Queen at government offices and police stations run by colonial officials.

The belief that the Duke was the mountain god's wandering son was reinforced when he accompanied the Queen on an official visit to the New Hebrides in 1974.

The Duke was told of the cult by John Champion, the British resident commissioner, who suggested he send them a portrait of himself.

"Prince Philip is important to us because our ancestors told us that part of our custom is in England," said Mr Malia, who took over from his father as village chief in 2003.

Younanen is not marked on maps and reaching it requires a local guide and a three-hour drive through dirt trails from Lenakel, the island's capital.

Village children play naked, the women dress in traditional grass skirts, while the men, clothed in old t-shirts, usually carry machetes.

Mr Malia added that the Duke had told villagers not to ever take money from people who visited, but that they should accept food, like rice, to share among themselves.

The villagers also associate natural phenomena with the Duke. In March 2015, it was reported they were convinced that a cyclone which killed at least 11 people, was nature's dramatic curtain-raiser to the Duke visiting the country the following year.

Asked if the Duke's blessings would help with the tropical storms that often battered the islands, Mr Malia said it was not generally in his remit as they generally flowed up from the south.

Telegraph, London