opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

The patron saint of Corfu is St Spyridon, from the 4th century. The saint was from Cyprus, and never had any particular association with Corfu until the Fall of Constantinople, when a monk from Corfu chose to bring his relics home with him. The church housing his relics, built in the 1580s, is the main church of the island, and it attracts pilgrims and locals alike.

The alley leading up to the church, St Spyridon St, houses the peak  of tourist tat. The bell tower of St Spyridon itself rises incongruous in the background.

The Church of Saint Eleutherius and St Anne stands just one block away from the cathedral of St Spyridon, and is testament to a time when that made sense. Another reminder of Venice, which has a similar density of churches.

Built in 1700 by the Vervitsiotis family, whose crest it features. Turned over to the food vendors guild. Restored bottom up, as the inscription says, in 1765. Destroyed in a Luftwaffe bombing in 1943 and rebuilt in 1950.

On the outside, the church of St Spyridon has a decent footprint for a building in the Old Town. On the inside, the church of St Spyridon is a dark, surprisingly small affair.

Once your eyes adjust to the dark, what is most striking to a contemporary Greek is how Western the frescoes and the older icons look.

https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91%CF%81%CF%87%CE%B5%CE%AF%CE%BF:Corfu_town_70.JPG

One would expect no different of a cathedral built during 600 years of Venetian rule, and the four large icons at the back of the church (not finding them online readily) are very straightforwardly Italian baroque in their execution.

But the Byzantine styling of icons in the 20th century, such as are universally seen in churches in the Greek diaspora, is a 20th century revival, spearheaded by the painter Fotis Kontoglou. In the 19th century, icon painters were a lot more Western.

My village church was built in 1907. All the icons, including the iconostasis, are neo-Byzantine. But the small paintings at the top of the iconostasis, of scenes from the life of Christ, are both older and Western. Although more mawkish French in execution than baroque Italian.

Revivals are a recurring characteristic of modern Greek culture, and this is the Byzantine rather than the classical Greek iteration of it. The Greek word for it, αναπαλαίωση, would be glossed as “reveteration.” It’s the opposite of “renovation”: it’s making everything old again.

It’s not all 17th century battlements and 18th century multi-storeys and 19th century neoclassicism. There’s also the signal contribution of the 20th century to architecture.

To begin: Local open air gym, complete with protest banner about how the city has been asking the government for funding for a closed roof gymnasium for the past 40 years.

I liked the juxtaposition of the basketball hoops and the crumbling stately Old Town building in the background.

St Athanasius Square, the tourist placard says, was a battlement or something like that, which I guess explains why it wasn’t built up until the 20th century.

And smack in the middle of Old Corfu town, the results are as much an eyesore as you might expect of 20th century Greece.

On this side of the square, the lesser eyesore, the municipal theater. Standard brutalist structure trying to echo something nicer, and failing. (Corfu Town already has a real colonnade, in the Liston.)

Eyesore points added for the municipal theater being so titled in English only. You’re the municipal theatre, not a souvenir shop. Have some self-respect.

The greater eyesore on St Athanasius Square, the offices of the regional government. Brutalism not even pretending to look nice.

In the corner, a sculpture of the top of Athens Polytechnic, no doubt alluding to the 1973 anti-dictatorship uprising there, in the sunken into the ground style so popular recently in public sculpture.

(I’ve seen several instances in Melbourne, it is presumably some kind of postmodern Ozymandias chic.)

No amount of soundly democratic Ozymandias chic is salvaging this building.

I was asked whether there were any signs of the presence in Corfu of the Durrell family, so beloved of English mass culture.

But fear not, The Durrell Spot, a little shop on the border of the Old and the New Town, will take care of all your Durrell needs.

Pictured: new sculptures of Lawrence and Gerald, justifying the renaming…

And the pre-existing statues in the Boschetto:

• Constantine Theotokis, who (again) I will talk about later.

• Lorenzo Mavilis, the best of Greece’s sonnet writers. Theotokis fell out with him just before Mavilis died, for not being socialist enough; finding that out got me quite annoyed. Though it’s hardly the first time a socialist/communist put ideology in front of friendship.

And the statue which is why the statue park exists at all, and clearly the first one here, as the surrounding colonnade gives away,

• Frederick North, 5th Earl of Guilford, founder of the Ionian Academy, the first modern Greek institution of higher learning. (If the name looks familiar: he was the son of the Prime Minister who lost the American colonies in the American Revolutionary War.)

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.

… when it’s not swamped by scaffolding. Under restoration works since October 2022, closed to the public.

The Achilleum palace is near the village of Garouna, 10 km south of Corfu Town.

Depicted, on the kiosk outside my accommodation, the Garouna Guys, a local folk troupe, playing tonight. Which normally would guarantee me checking them out.

One  more venue I missed, by half an hour, was the Byzantine Museum of Corfu, and occasionally still functioning church of Our Lady Opposite the Mountain (Antivouniotissa).

The mountain, if I’m reading Google maps correctly, is Northern Corfu.

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 again, I have gone the wrong way, and I’m heading away from the medieval city.

Once you get back on (George) Theotokis St on the way to the Old Town, you notice that the landscape changes somewhat abruptly around Belisarius St: the houses start to look noticeably older. And that’s because there are no city walls anymore, separating the old from the new city, although the occasional remnant of the walls surfaces.

Specifically, this was the site of the Porta Reale, the Royal Gate. Levelled by the city council in 1893, at a time when cities throughout Europe were getting rid of their medieval walls. Already by then people started to think levelling mediaeval things was a bad idea; a furious protest at the barbarism of the demolition was one of the first published writings by Konstantinos Theotokas, on whom more anon.

The foundations of the gate were recently discovered in maintenance work, and are now marked onto the cobblestone.

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 of Asian art. It was originally governor Thomas Maitland‘s mansion, also housing the Ionian parliament, built 1824.

Given which…

… General Maitland, I presume

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Maitland_(British_Army_officer)#/media/File:John_Hoppner_(1758-1810)_-_Portrait_of_Sir_Thomas_Maitland_(1760-1824).jpg

The Museum houses plenty of cultural events. For instance, just as I was taking those pictures, this was going on:

Not for the last time, I find out about a gig here after it’s already happened.

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 following day, there nothing random about that: the building was the Old Town Ηall, which I had walked behind. Next to it on Town Ηall square, the Catholic cathedral of the city.

The second piece of evidence, this cannon randomly deposited in George Theotokis (formerly: San Rocco) Square, around the corner from my accommodation, dated 1681.

As with a lot of such administrative name changes, they get ignored by the locals. Corfu-born George Theotokis, four-time prime minister, deserves commemoration, but he already has the street leading to the square, plus a statue right beside St Spyridon Cathedral:

And because the Theotokis family were such a big deal here, it does seem like every third street in town is named after a Theotokis. The bus stop at the square is defiantly named “Saroko” instead.

The New Town Fortress is inland, complementing the Old Town Fortress in the sea. They are both formidable, and both stacked with Venetian masonry.

And both in Corfu and in Greek as a whole, most words you see ending in –ada, including pastitsada and the Spianada, are Venetian counterparts to words ending in Standard Italian in –ata.

The streetscape in Corfu is faintly reminiscent of Venice—but only faintly. Ironically, my strongest flashback of Venice was bumping into the cathedral of St Spyridon merely by turning a corner. That is something that this bit of the Old Town shares with Venice: unexpected piazzas, exploding into view.

St Spyridon did an encore, with two more churches in the next piazza.

And I’m reasonably sure that the photogenic, run-down Old Corfu Town alleys would not look out of place at least somewhere in Northern Italy;

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 (they’re affiliated with Corfu Beer). At least this manufacturer knows the Hellenic word for ginger, πιπερόριζα “pepper report”.

Was happy with this one, it had much more of a kick.

This is a poster advertising cricket, from Anagennisi “Rebirth” Cricket Club:

In fact, from what the leader board of the recent 1st Olympia T20 Cricket tournament in Corfu tells me, there are several cricket teams in Greece, and there’s a lot more Pakistani than Greek names in them. There will have been a Corfiot/Pakistani encounter, but it looks like it happened a few years ago.

So the people of Corfu learned from the British overlords:

• how to make ginger beer,
• how to play cricket,
• how to have imposing parks,
• and how to make stout.

This place really is anti-Malia.

Malia tourist resort in Crete is everything crap about Britain, unadjusted and unrepentant. Cretans talk about the place like an infestation they have to put up with. (They don’t like drunken chavs one bit, but they do like their money.)

Corfu is looking right now like everything good about Britain, gently assimilated.

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 the top, wedged as his term was between Constantine Karamanlis and Andreas Papandreou.