Corfu: the island that Venice and Britain shaped

When Corfiots describe their old town to someone who hasn’t been, they tend to use a comparison that surprises: “It’s like Venice, but with sun.” The comparison is not vanity. It is urban archaeology. The narrow covered streets the locals call kandounia, the ochre and yellow facades, the wrought-iron balconies above stone arcades: all of this does not resemble Venice by accident. It resembles it because it was built during the same four hundred and eleven years in which Venice governed the island.

Corfu — Kerkyra in Greek, a name derived from the nymph Korkyra of mythology — is the northernmost of the Ionian Islands. It lies barely two kilometres from the Albanian coast and seventy kilometres from Italy. This geographical position explains almost everything about its history.

The four Venetian centuries

The Republic of Venice took control of Corfu in 1386, purchasing it from the heirs of the Angevin family that had previously governed it. The Venetians held it until 1797, when Napoleon dissolved the Republic of Venice with the Treaty of Campo Formio. Four hundred and eleven years of uninterrupted administration is a period long enough to change a culture profoundly.

The most visible result is the architecture of the historic town centre, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007. Corfu’s old town is the only example of a Venetian city of significant size on Greek territory — and in fact one of the best preserved in the entire Mediterranean, in better condition than many districts of Venice itself. The Esplanade (Spianada), the vast square separating the historic centre from the Old Fortress, was designed by the Venetians to provide a clear field of fire for the fortress artillery. Today it is the largest urban park in the Balkans.

The Old Fortress — Paleo Frourio — was built by the Venetians on a rock formation the Byzantines had already fortified. The New Fortress — Neo Frourio — was raised in the sixteenth century to protect the northern approach to the city. Both still stand, both are open to visitors, and both are testimony that Venice considered Corfu a first-order strategic possession: the gateway to the Adriatic from the eastern Mediterranean.

Napoleon’s intermezzo and the British

Between 1797 and 1815 the Ionian Islands passed from Venice to the French (Treaty of Campo Formio), to the Russians and Ottomans jointly (the short-lived Septinsular Republic of 1800), and back to the French (1807). In 1815, the Congress of Vienna created the United States of the Ionian Islands under British protection. This was the first Greek state protected by Great Britain, sixteen years before the Greek independent state properly existed.

The British protectorate lasted until 1864, when London voluntarily ceded the islands to Greece as a political gift for the new King George I. Those forty-nine years left marks completely different from the Venetian ones, and for that reason more surprising: cricket, which is still played on the Esplanade in Corfu Town with regular leagues and a match calendar; ginger beer (tsitsibira in local Greek), which islanders still drink as a regular summer beverage; and the first modern paved roads in Greece, built by British military engineers in the 1820s.

The neoclassical palazzo of the Palace of St Michael and St George, built by the British between 1819 and 1824 as the High Commissioner’s residence, is the most elegant building on the Esplanade and perhaps in all of Corfu. It now houses the Museum of Asian Art — an extraordinarily specific collection of Japanese, Chinese and Indian art assembled by a nineteenth-century Corfiot diplomat — which has the additional virtue of being perpetually empty of visitors.

The kitchen as palimpsest

Corfiot gastronomy is where the historical layers become most tangible. Pastitsada, the island’s most representative dish, is a chicken or beef stew slow-cooked in a tomato sauce spiced with cinnamon, cloves, black pepper and red wine, served over thick pasta. It is, essentially, a Venetian dish adapted with eastern Mediterranean spices. Sofrito — veal sautéed with garlic, vinegar and white wine — comes equally from the Adriatic Venetian culinary tradition.

What Corfiot cooking has that no other Greek island has to the same degree is this synthesis of North and South, of Italian tradition and Mediterranean ingredient. Corfu’s olive oil is of exceptional quality — the island has over four million olive trees, many planted by the Venetians themselves, who paid Corfiot farmers in coins for each tree planted — and it is the foundation on which everything else is built.

Achilleion and illustrious visitors

In the hills south of the city, with views over the sea and the Albanian coast, stands the Achilleion: a neoclassical palace built in 1892 by Empress Sisi of Austria-Hungary as a personal retreat. Sisi chose Corfu because it was the most remote place she could withdraw to while maintaining imperial dignity. The palace, designed in Pompeian style with gardens descending in terraces toward the sea, reflects Sisi’s obsession with Achilles: statues of the Greek hero appear in every conceivable variation. In 1898, Sisi was assassinated in Geneva by an Italian anarchist. In 1907, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany purchased the palace from her heir and made it his own summer retreat until the outbreak of the First World War. Today it is a museum, with a statue of Wilhelm II in the garden that guides present with conspicuous discomfort.

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