Once clear of the Spianada, I could see a bunch of magnificently run down buildings in Corfu, and the kind of stream of people I’d last seen in Old Rhodes, and which tells me that this is my kind of place It really is postcard ready, this place. One more block, and I came upon […]
After following the coastline north from Douglas Obelisk (and that took a false start or two itself), I finally caught sight, not of the Old City itself, but of the Old City Fortress. (As I found out later, that was the Old City in early Byzantine times.) The ancient Greek looking bit on the fortress […]
My sense of direction proved unexpectedly challenged in Corfu. In Larisa, I had an excuse: the landscape was flat, every piazza corner looked like every other piazza corner. In Corfu Town, I kept getting lost so systematically, I don’t think I can blame the terrain any more. In fact, the contrast with Zante Town makes […]
My travelogue posts have a spasmodic character, and they reflect the spasmodic way they have been authored. The travelogue pattern I have established in this sojourn to Greece has been: Walk 100 m Take 5 photos Spend an hour in a cafe writing commentary about those photos, often with tangential excursions into other aspects of […]
I didn’t have a local guide in Corfu, so I couldn’t work out what the local rivalries are among the Seven Islands. Working out what town the locals resent is ground zero for establishing contrasts and getting people on side, I’ve always felt. (Mainly because of how much Salonicans resent Athens.) I tried that technique […]
I came to Corfu and Zante in my 50s, out of a nebulous query that I had formulated in my teens. The Ionian islands were the only part of Greece not to have been ruled by the Ottomans. They had 600 years of continuous rule from Venice instead. How did that make them different from […]
It is an exaggeration to surmise that I go to places off my usual route when overseas, merely so they can serve as writing prompts. It is, but not as much of one as it should be. There have been several trips in my life where I spent more time writing about what I was […]
It’s an interesting thing, to interrogate one’s petty prejudices. Especially when you think yourself above petty prejudices. Your correspondent aspires to cosmopolitanism and objectivity, and whenever he runs into the siren song of Greek nationalism, he will spell Greek words with a <c> instead. But bias seeps under your skin all the more when you […]
At Pringipessa taverna, Salonica, 23 May 2023.
There’s been an election here. The results were SYRIZA electorally smashed. Partly by a resurgent right and far right, but it’s been far too convenient for to blame that alone. There’s been a whole lot more voters in no mood to give SYRIZA a third chance; and the memories of 2015–2019 are raw enough, that […]