Category: Greece

The icons are throughout the museum, and on the upper floor, as the placards bemoaning the earthquake cease, they are arrayed in chronological order, to tell a story. The Byzantine story may display some variation, but you would need a keener eye than mine to see it. Byzantine icons were highly stylized and highly conventionalized, […]

The museum features not just entire salvaged iconostases, but an entire fresco chamber from the monastery of St Andrew in Volimes, other side of the island (built 1595). As I noted, frescoes were a feature of late Byzantine churches, which were not included in the Byzantine revival led by Fotis Kontoglou. I guess they were […]

In the picture, the statue of the great man in front of the new museum, in the Central Square named after him The new museum is called the Post-Byzantine Museum of Zante. Its subject matter is the period of Venetian and British rule. The 1953 earthquake is everywhere in the museum. It is as much […]

When a small town in Greece has produced a great person, the shadow of that person weighs heavy on that town. Mostly because that town sees to it that it does. Everything in Sitia is named after the great Renaissance poet Vincenzo Cornaro. Similarly, everything in Zante is named after Greek national poet, Dionysios Solomos. […]

There is a Hellenic coinage for tennis, antisphaerisis, although you will only ever see it in the name of sports clubs established in the 19th century. Such as the ZAOA, the Zacynthian Sporting League for Antisphaerisis. (Ζακυνθικός αθλητικός όμιλος αντισφαίρισης.) The poster helpfully adds: “Tennis for everybody!” I helped translate a Duden-style dictionary of modern […]

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 […]