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Philharmonic societies are all over Greece, and they do lots of things with lots of instrument groupings. But they are most prominent for their marching bands (playing the same march every parade), and that’s what people on Greece think a philharmonic does by default. This is the headquarters of the old Philharmonic society, founded 1840. […]

The patron saint of Corfu is St Spyridon, from the 4th century. The saint was from Cyprus, and never had any particular association with Corfu until the Fall of Constantinople, when a monk from Corfu chose to bring his relics home with him. The church housing his relics, built in the 1580s, is the main […]

It’s not all 17th century battlements and 18th century multi-storeys and 19th century neoclassicism. There’s also the signal contribution of the 20th century to architecture. To begin: Local open air gym, complete with protest banner about how the city has been asking the government for funding for a closed roof gymnasium for the past 40 […]

I was asked whether there were any signs of the presence in Corfu of the Durrell family, so beloved of English mass culture. And make no mistake, it wasn’t the high culture of Lawrence Durrell that made a generation of Britons fall in love with Corfu. It was Gerald Durrell‘s quirky middlebrow memoir of Corfu […]

When my mother visited Corfu, she was very taken with the Achilleum, the summer palace of Empress Sissy of Austria-Hungary, and has been steadily encouraging me to see it. My Lonely Planet notes there’s surprisingly little to see on the inside, but it does look a million bucks on the outside… … when it’s not […]

My AirBnB was around the corner from San Rocco square, which itself is just outside the Old Town. The fact that the square had corners was enough to repeatedly defeat me. One block away from San Rocco square, and I am already in Anytown, Greece, with nondescript apartment buildings. Which immediately tells me that yet […]

This is the Museum of Asian art, Corfu. And by all accounts, it is a very fine collection of Asian art too. With particular attention to the Greco-Buddhist cultural synthesis, but also with good representation of China and Japan. No prizes for working out that this complex did not start out life as a museum […]

The evidence that there were Venetians here is to be seen as well, but it needs a bit more hunting than the evidence of the British. The first evidence I saw was a heraldic crest from 1692, randomly popped into a wall I walked past, outside Pane e Souvlaki souvlaki joint. As I realised the […]