Zante, 2023

Zante has cultural loading to Greeks, which you need to be aware of to understand what I was looking for here.

• The Ionian islands are portrayed in Greek literary and artistic history as Greece’s window to the west. Western music and art had their first foothold here.
• Western literary trends were followed longer, and in a much larger area—we have Petrarchan sonnets from Cyprus, written not that long after Petrarch himself. But going into the 19th century, Western literature was happening in Constantinople and the Ionian islands. (And Modern Greeks have had ideological reasons to ignore the former.)
• Zante is seen as the main centre of artistic creativity of the islands. People refer to Zante serenades, even though you’ll hear the same serenades in Cephallonia.
• Zante produced three rock star poets at the same time: Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827), Andreas Kalvos (1792–1869), Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857). Solomos wrote the poem that the Greek national anthem excerpts.
• An earthquake in 1953 completely destroyed the main towns of both Zante and Cephallonia. The towns there were rebuilt from scratch.

So, coming to Zante, I expect a former capital of the arts, with nothing in the landscape left to indicate what it was.

And indeed, my first impression of the place was pleasant regional beach town, rather than epicentre of Greek literary culture. That impression got filled in by a three block walk, and wasn’t refuted by a walk along the length of the town.

There is something striking about this view of the south of the town, taken from the Central Square.

Zante Town is not big: 10k in the 2011 census, which makes it same size as Sitia. Yet such a small town prominently features the signs of two distinct nougat workshops (ΜΑΝΤΟΛΑΤΟ). In fact, there’s clearly at least a half dozen workshops in town, judging from the offerings on sale.

That struck me at the time of the photo. What struck me after walking the town is that Zante genuinely feels 5 times bigger than Sitia, a town built from scratch in the late 19th century. And that already tells you this is a weightier place than my first impression tells me.

The Central Square is lovely and well ordered, yet somehow too big and empty, compared to Larisa, which seems to have perfected the art form. But as the 1930s model confirms, the square is the size that the Venetians had made it. They thought big.