Archive:

The Venetians called Zante the Fior di Levante, the flower of the Levant, because of how beautiful the landscape is. Greeks still do. At least in telephone directory ads. I am rather taken by the recent 11880 ads, featuring the Zante ferryboat, and/or the female narrator rattling off a list of Greek towns, and merrily […]

Opposite my hotel, a monument to Dimitris Lagios (1952-1991): Δημήτρης Λάγιος Lagios worked as a continuator of the Italianate, mandolin-heavy musical tradition of the island, seeking to extend it to loftier subjects than the traditional love songs. He seems to have needed to be pushed into releasing recordings commercially, and his discography on the monument […]

The three rock star poets of the early 19th century from here were Foscolo, Kalvos, and Solomos. Zante in the early 19th century, with the Venetians just seen off, was still a heavily Italian domain, and Italian was the default high language. Much of the nobility of the island was of Italian descent, and everybody’s […]

This pair of sculptures on the seashore was completely unexpected. What was a flayed man contemplating a skull doing here? Andreas Vesalius, born with the more Flemish name Andries van Wesel, was the founder of modern anatomy, one of the first doctors in the Renaissance to dissect humans and work out what was going on […]

What’s left of Venice in the urban landscape of Zante Town is, predictably, not much. (And it’s still more than what’s left of the British presence; apparently it’s limited to a soccer pitch in the old town fortress.) Old Venetian crests feature in houses they built, both in the Ionian Islands and in Crete: they […]

The local specialty in Corfu was pastitsada, macaroni and Greek braised meat, its time-honoured tomato sauce with cinnamon and cloves (as reinvented in Cincinnati chilli) augmented with secret extra herbs and spices (if you’re lucky). The local specialty in Zante can overlap with braised meat sauce, but the foundations of its sauce, skordostoumpi, are garlic […]

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 […]

When it is not hosting mass, the Church of St George on Old Corfu Fortress hosts cultural exhibitions, such as the current exhibition on local writer Constantine Theotokis, who wrote the kind of social realist novel that was all the rage a century ago. I’ve already alluded to him a couple of times.   What […]

O Church of St George, formerly Anglican barrack Church of the fortress and now Orthodox Church, certain to have been unnerving to at least some Greek clerics who have served here: where have you been all my life? Mass is only celebrated here twice a year: on St George’s Day, and for the Epitaphios procession […]

I’m embarking on my assault of the old fortress of Corfu. No, I am not climbing all of that, and mercifully St George’s church, my main target, is fairly low down on the hill. Speaking of assaults, this is the sculpture raised to Marshal Schulenburg, who defended Corfu for the Venetians against the Ottomans in […]