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The British influence on Corfu
This is what people in Corfu call a Corfu Beer Red (Κόκκινη). I call it a stout, and a damn good one.
This Cheimarios company’s Tzitzibira. You’ll know that drink as Ginger beer. It is both milder and less sweet than what I’m used to from Bundaberg Ginger Beer.
This is Royal Ionian’s Ginger Ale (they’re affiliated with Corfu Beer). At least this manufacturer knows the Hellenic word for ginger, πιπερόριζα “pepper report”.
Was happy with this one, it had much more of a kick.
This is a poster advertising cricket, from Anagennisi “Rebirth” Cricket Club:
“Get to know this historical sport, unique to our island”.
Not that unique anymore. I recently read that Pakistani immigrants in Athens have founded their own cricket club, the Kallithea Sixers—after years of playing cricket in every piazza in Greece they could get to.
Corfu has made cricket its own, and that has included the rather Hellenic way they pronounce cricket terminology. People on social media have already worked out that the Kallithea Sixers and Corfu Anagennisi are going to have some communication problems, if and when they play a match against each other.
In fact, from what the leader board of the recent 1st Olympia T20 Cricket tournament in Corfu tells me, there are several cricket teams in Greece, and there’s a lot more Pakistani than Greek names in them. There will have been a Corfiot/Pakistani encounter, but it looks like it happened a few years ago.
So the people of Corfu learned from the British overlords:
- how to make ginger beer,
- how to play cricket,
- how to have imposing parks,
- and how to make stout.
This place really is anti-Malia.
Malia tourist resort in Crete is everything crap about Britain, unadjusted and unrepentant. Cretans talk about the place like an infestation they have to put up with. (They don’t like drunken chavs one bit, but they do like their money.)
Corfu is looking right now like everything good about Britain, gently assimilated.
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