Category: Culture

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 […]

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 […]

Wasn’t expecting to find this here. Next to the Liston, not too forward, not too loud, a bust of George Rallis, prime minister in the late 1970s, and local boy (albeit born in Athens). His prime ministership was not that consequential. A few Greeks, I gathered, appreciated having one prime ministerial term without histrionics from […]

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 […]