In pursuit of Foscolo
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 education was in Italian.
Hence Foscolo moving to Italy and writing exclusively in Italian, even though he kept pining for Zante.
Hence Kalvos joining Foscolo for several years, working as his scribe, and writing in Italian for a decade before trying his hand at archaic Greek. A recent commentator has remarked, if Kalvos knew better Greek, we wouldn’t have his Odes at all.
Hence Solomos dedicating himself to the promotion of the Greek vernacular—but jotting down all his marginal notes in Italian.
Hence for that matter Niccoló Calichiopulo Manzaro being of noble Italian stock, registered in the Libro d’Oro—and when, as Nikolaos Chalikiopoulos Mantzaros, he established the Old Philharmonic in Corfu, banning the use of Italian.
There was a fluidity between the two cultural identities in 1800. That cultural fluidity is not perhaps alien to Greece at all; but it is alien to the modern construction of Greek identity. People had to choose, like Mantzaros did.
Foscolo chose the other way, and that entered him into the canon of Italian poetry. And when my former colleague Gregoria Manzin, brought up on Foscolo, found out I was going to Zante, she bade me look him up.
Which gave me a project. I don’t know if she was expecting me to find so much.
The thing is, Italian literature is alien to Greece, but it’s not alien to Zante. At least some people remember Foscolo, and at least some people perpetuate his memory. There are a decent number of studies about him in local bookshops, for example.
The local cinema-cum-café, for example, is named for him: Cine Foskolos. (Now showing: Stephen King’s Boogeyman.)
Greek readers at this point might be wondering whether the cinema is named for long-time soapie auteur Nikos Foskolos instead. I doubt it, I don’t think Zante is that kind of place…)
The cinema-cum-café is right on the Central Square (yes, I am allergic to calling it Solomos Square), and I grew rather fond of it as a place to hang out. Not least because it kept going till 1 am:
As I walked the length of the town, I found myself on Foscolo Street, and decided I needed a more photogenic shot of the street sign than a dry cleaning shop.
I guess the birthplace of the poet counts as that?
Or, as the side plaque sadly clarifies, the site of the birthplace of the poet. Like just about everything else in the town, whatever was here before 1953 is long gone.
The inscription on the statue is the last two verses of his sonnet To Zacynthus:
motherland of mine: our fate alreadywritten, the unmourned grave.
As Gregoria explains,
The inscription is the last tercet of the sonnet “A Zacinto” (To Zante) – which I had to learn by heart in primary school (I bet this would be considered rote learning today).It refers to his self-exile after Zante moved hands, from Venice to Austria—concerted by Napoleon, as you mentioned in your posts. He moved to Napoleon’s young Kingdom of Italy, which spanned the central and northern part of the peninsula and included part of the Emilia Romagna region (the region where we just had massive floods), down to Le Marche too.He missed his birth island all his life and referred to it in several of his works. being both neoclassicist and pre-romantic, his experience of exile and his attraction to Hellas became two of his major literary themes.His most celebrated works are sonnets and odes, among which To Zacynthos and the wonderful long ode Of the Sepulchres, and an epistolary novel called The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis. He also wrote a few tragedies.Of the Sepulchres is a discussion with the literati Ippolito Pindemonte about Napoleon’s Edict, which dictated that cemeteries had to be built outside of the city walls, and tombs be all uniform and bearing no inscriptions.He ended up dying in London, pretty much destitute. He is now buried in Santa Croce, Florence, after the “unified” Kingdom of Italy (that of 1861, not the Napoleonic one) brought his remains back to Italy—which was not home.
(What counts as home is a discussion we continued; more anon.)
This model in the post-Byzantine museum is of the old municipal theatre, named for Foscolo.
There is a new municipal theatre, and in fact an outdoor theatre as well—although the municipal theatre was stuck in scaffolding until quite recently, because of lack of funds for its restoration or something.
The new municipal theatre has not been named after Foscolo; that baton has been passed to the cinema-cum-café.
In the Solomos museum, this is a near-contemporary painting of the Foscolo theatre burning down after the 1953 earthquake:
And Foscolo gets a bust just behind the main square, the other side from Vesalius:
Hic jacet Vesalius
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 with his own eyes, rather than relying on the dissections performed by Galen and Hippocrates.
For that, he got great renown, including an appointment as court physician to the Holy Roman Emperor in Spain. He also got a lot of derision from fellow academics, for getting his hands dirty instead of reading about it in books. The Spanish Inquisition was also not too happy about whatever he was up to.
(Okay, it was the religious authorities in general and not specifically the Spanish Inquisition, but everything sounds better if you mentioned the Spanish Inquisition. After all, nobody expects them.)
A decade later, rumor goes, he’d had enough, and he had just received an invitation to go back to lecturing in Padua. Whatever he intended to do about it, he left Spain for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
And there is a sculpture to him here on the Zante sea front, behind the Central Square, because he got randomly shipwrecked on the way back, and died here on the island.
That sudden, that random.
Andreas Vezal. Born Brussels, 1514. Died Zante, 1564.
I was asked what was with the Hamlet pose in the sculpture. The original publication of his book had some way out there illustration (that’s why the flayed man was used), and there’s lots of specimens holding a skull, though not Hamleting at it. This illustration comes closest to a Hamlet:
What’s left of Venice in Zante
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 are a very common sight in Rethymnon.
Here they would have been toppled in the earthquake…
… And when people rebuilt, they popped them right back into the new house.
Three of the Ionian islands have prominent patron saints: Spyridon in Corfu, Gerasimus in Cephalonia, and Dionysius in Zante. The cults of the saints are huge: there are not that many Spiros in Corfu, but Cephalonia is full of Gerasimoses, and Zante of Dionysises, named after the saints.
I assumed that Dionysius was of the same vintage as Spyridon—presumably the first century St Dionysius the Areopagite. But to my surprise, both Gerasimus and Dionysius were born in the 16th century and were locals. So their cult was promoted by their own community.
Which is why it is possible that the birthplace of St Dionysus of Zacynthus, bishop of Aegina, is right next door to my hotel. (With impressive flowers spilling over from the next house.)
And that the first church he officiated in, St Nicholas of the Quay (του Μώλου) is still at the edge of the Central Square. It is one of only three churches that have been restored, and it looks very out of place next to its neoclassical neighbours.)
The tourist trade has also encouraged the city fathers to revive a practice we know the Venetians partook of:
Medieval Times, Zante edition. Something else I’ve just missed. Again.
And if you haven’t been reading that much creatine Renaissance literature, now you know both the Italian and hence the Cretan Greek word for jousting: τζιόστρα.
Or, according to the more literal-minded official language, “pole-battle”, κονταρομαχία.
Skordostoumpi
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 and vinegar. Fried up.
They warn you, travel guides and out-of-towners. It’s heavy. Has had to be watered down for tourists, they say darkly.
Eggplant skordostoumpi, on its own. (Asteria taverna.) This is actually not that far off from dishes I’ve had in Chinese restaurants:
Here pictured with ladotyri (white cheese served with olive oil), and that fine German invention, the Radler, recently embraced by Greeks, and gratefully appreciated by me on many a summer’s day.
(To those in the Anglosphere, yes, it’s a shandy, and yes, Europeans bottle shandy, and it’s awesome. New Zealanders already know all about Radler; Monteith brewery, after all, copyrighted the name. Which is why rival brewers trying to cash in on the trend spell it backwards, as Reldar.)
Beef skordostoumpi, with cheese. (Varkarolla taverna.) We’re not in China any more:
It’s yummy, but… I had to eat this very slowly…
Rabbit skordostoumpi, on spaghetti, with chunks of white cheese. (Stathmos taverna.) This was the version I’d been warned of as extra stinky, because of how the garlic and the cheese interacted:
Still yummy, still had to eat even slower and no, I didn’t finish it.
… And yes. The garlic is slowly working its way out of my system, thank you.
Zante, 2023
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 a much larger area—we have Petrarchan sonnets from Cyprus, written not that long after Petrarch himself. But going into the 19th century, Western literature was happening in Constantinople and the Ionian islands. (And Modern Greeks have had ideological reasons to ignore the former.)
- Zante is seen as the main centre of artistic creativity of the islands. People refer to Zante serenades, even though you’ll hear the same serenades in Cephallonia.
- Zante produced three rock star poets at the same time: Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827), Andreas Kalvos (1792–1869), Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857). Solomos wrote the poem that the Greek national anthem excerpts.
- An earthquake in 1953 completely destroyed the main towns of both Zante and Cephallonia. The towns there were rebuilt from scratch.
So, coming to Zante, I expect a former capital of the arts, with nothing in the landscape left to indicate what it was.
And indeed, my first impression of the place was pleasant regional beach town, rather than epicentre of Greek literary culture. That impression got filled in by a three block walk, and wasn’t refuted by a walk along the length of the town.
(I have to confess, first impressions are what I’ve been working off throughout this trip. I’ll form an impression in a few minutes, and will delight in my skill as an impressionist painter in phone photos on Facebook, extrapolating that initial impression.)
My impression of Zante Town is necessarily informed by me having been to Corfu Town first, and by the 1953 earthquake destroying a lot of the town that would have looked more similar to Corfu. From the model of 1930s Zante in the post-Byzantine museum, it does seem that the buildings indeed used to be a lot closer to the Corfu model, three-storey and closely packed.
Zante 1930s, from the north.
(Zante 2020s, from the south. I never said I was any good at panoramic photography.)
With that proviso in place, the impression I have formed is that Corfu was always a bustling town, and the centre of where things were at in the region. Zante has history; some of it still peeks through the landscape, and the town has been rebuilt as a very pleasant resort landscape.
But there is something a bit too laid back and leisurely about the urban landscape, and even about what very little of the original Town seems to remain. This does not seem to have been the centre of where things were at.
… But.
There is something striking about this view of the south of the town, taken from the Central Square.
Zante Town is not big: 10k in the 2011 census, which makes it same size as Sitia. Yet such a small town prominently features the signs of two distinct nougat workshops (ΜΑΝΤΟΛΑΤΟ). In fact, there’s clearly at least a half dozen workshops in town, judging from the offerings on sale.
That struck me at the time of the photo. What struck me after walking the town is that Zante genuinely feels 5 times bigger than Sitia, a town built from scratch in the late 19th century. And that already tells you this is a weightier place than my first impression tells me.
The Central Square is lovely and well ordered, yet somehow too big and empty, compared to Larisa, which seems to have perfected the art form. But as the 1930s model confirms, the square is the size that the Venetians had made it. They thought big.
My hotel is close to the north edge of the town, so heading further north, Zante looks a bit more Anytown, Greece. Nice bell tower though (Church of the Holy Trinity, I think?)
Same applies southern edge of town, near the cathedral.
Constantine Theotokis
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 struck me most from his novels was that it was possible for the people of Corfu to sing in barbershop quartets for their folk songs, and at the same time be virulently patriarchal. Westernisation is not that kind of panacaea…
The exhibition on Constantine Theotokis was a bit light on, but it did bring back memories. (I used him as a source for Corfu dialect in my thesis.) I have noted that Karkavitsas’ novel The Beggar was a kind of Thessalian Gothic, that I read at an impressionable enough age to make me scared to go to Larisa.
I read him a lot later, but Theotokis was writing in the same frame of mind, a decade later, condemning the rigid patriarchal mores of traditional society, and the collection Corfu Stories is pretty relentless in its repeated depiction of honour killing after honour killing. So yes, Corfiot Gothic.
That aside, his potted biography made him sound like a much too idealistic and annoying socialist. And yet those are the types that tend to get vindicated by history.
Not least in his condemnation of the demolition of the Porto Reale, the Venetian gate between the old town and the new.
…. And that marks the end of the Corfu posts.
There will be even more posts from Zante tomorrow.
Church of St George
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 on Good Friday. Which answers my question about whether parishioners have to pay a ticket to get in. There aren’t any.
Apparently, the placard also says, the prominent Voulgaris family founded the church of Saint Spyridon, and thus felt entitled to donate its iconostasis, complete with 17th century icons, to the new church. I’m surprised church has worked that way, but the Ionian islands were not as far removed from feudalism by then as they should have been.
I have to say, the placard completely confused me, and it took me several iterations to work out what had happened; the placard is not quite right.
When St Spyridon’s remains were brought to Corfu, they were initially housed in the private family chapel of the Voulgaris. The chapel was demolished in 1577, to make room for the new town fortifications. The Voulgaris arranged transfer of the relics to the newly built church of St Spyridon; but they held on to the original, Byzantine-style iconostasis. And they donated it to the new church when it was made Orthodox—which was a big deal for the island, as it marked the transfer of power over the island from Britain to Greece.
The Church of St George was bombed during World War II, and repaired, like many other churches around here. As the inscription says, “Holy temple of St George, and this house of God was repaired through the piety of His children, June 1951.”
Within, the church is… well, oblong. Because it’s walled off, you don’t realise you’re inside a Greek temple. And the same applied to the actual Greek temples. (You didn’t think they were actually built to be exposed to the elements, did you?)
Old Fortress of Corfu
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 1716.
The street leading up to the new fortress is named for him, but is named for him in the typical distorted assimilation of 19th century Greek: Σχολεμβούργου (Skholemvourgou). They were trying to maintain the connection to “school” in the name.
TIL: At the onset of the dark ages, 6th century, the settlement of Corfu retreated into the well-defended fortress. What is now the town was settled, but used to be called the outer town (Xopoli). The very British park that I encountered on my way here, the Spianada, was a kind of moat between the two settlements— which is why the British found it not built over, and were able to make parkland out of it.
The moat of the Old Fortress has to be seen to be believed:
The Byzantine art collection in the old fortress of Corfu, housed in its guardhouse, is small but impressive.
I noted that the icons at St Spyridon were unmistakably Italian baroque. In the early 17th century though, icons were still being painted Byzantine style, as seen in this icon taken from the Church of Our Lady Opposite the Mountain (Antivouniotisa), which unsurprisingly is now the Byzantine Museum of Corfu (and which I ended up missing).
Above the guardhouse, I espied this inscription:
And that turned into: What does the inscription about Carl Sparre of Kronoborg in the old fortress of Corfu say, and who was Carl Sparre?
Yes, surprise surprise, this is not Venetian, it’s the old British army barracks.
I don’t get it. If the old British army barracks host the public library of Corfu, does that mean that people have to pay 6 euros admission to go to the library? What about the parishioners of the Church of St George? Does the church of St George even have any parishioners here?
The barracks of the new, British, boss, and then a reminder: the symbol of the old, Venetian boss: the Lion of St Mark’s.
And after that, the vote of unification with the even newer boss: Greek tourists trying to decipher the ancient Greek of the vote of the local parliament, welcoming the admission of the Ionian islands into the Kingdom of Greece in 1864.
The crest of the king of Greece is still on the front gate of the fortress: “my strength is the love of my people”.
On the accent of Corfu
As I’ve already noted several times in my trip, there is very little left of traditional dialect in Greece if you don’t go hunting for it, and Corfu Town at the start of tourist season is not the place to go looking for it.
All that really remains anywhere is regional variation in intonation.
Crete has melodramatic swooping, that it seems to mild to call just sing-song. By contrast, I was struck by the reassuring sound of Vangelis Lolos’ Thessalian monotone (and George Baloglou’s Salonican was not that much more animated.)
Cyprus and the Dodecanese seem to be in between: there is a sing-song there, but it is more low-key.
I was brought up on Greek Shadow puppetry (Karagiozis), which had several regional stereotypes. The faded aristocrat from Zante, Sior Nionio, sounded very sing-song and very Italian. And although it was comical exaggeration, it was clearly comical exaggeration based on something.
And I look forward to hearing what is left of that in Zante, because I’m not hearing it here. (Spoiler: I didn’t end up hearing it there either.)
There is a distinct Corfu intonation, which I occasionally hear in the street. And it sounds nothing like Sior Nionio from Karagiozis plays. To my astonishment, if I had to put my finger on it, I would say the intonation here sounds like Cyprus.
A couple of days after writing that, on the taxi out to the airport, I had a very pleasant surprise.
10 minutes of torrential Corfu dialect from my taxi driver. Dialect (well, dialectal nominal morphology, at least), not merely local intonation (which is still mysteriously Cypriot-like). It helped that he was 62—so the right age group; but clearly, if I wanted to hear more dialect here, I should have taken more cab rides.
The three Philharmonic societies of Corfu Town
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.
(Another museum missed, between the Whitsun public holiday and the never-on-Tuesday hours of the office.)
The new Philharmonic was founded in 1890, and was a socialist undertaking. Though founded in opposition to the old band, with blue rather than red uniforms, they named themselves after the founder of the old band, Nicholas Mantzaros.
There’s a third Philharmonic in Corfu Town, founded in 1980; that one is named for John Capodistria.
Across the island, there are 20 philharmonic societies.
(Information from: Οι Φιλαρμονικές της Κέρκυρας.)
Statue of Nicholas Mantzaros, outside the municipal theater. Founder of the old Philharmonic society, namer of the new Philharmonic, and composer of the Greek national anthem.
Those not blinded by patriotic forever may have noticed that the Greek national anthem sounds a bit like it came out of a comic operetta. Italian musical culture has deep roots here.
Indeed, one of the first things Mantzaros did when he founded the Philharmonic in 1840 was to mandate the use of Greek. He was a nobleman from the Italian Manzaro family in the Libro d’Oro, who accordingly declined to charge lucre for teaching music; but in the new dispensation of things, he was also an advocate of Greek nationalism, and that included privileging the Greek language in a Greek island.
Which was a bigger deal than it sounds. To the burghers of Corfu in 1840, using Greek instead of Italian as a high language of intellect and governance was a revolutionary (if not outright silly) notion.