Greece and the Ægean Islands

by Philip Sanford Marden

Despite the Venetian character of the fortresses, they remind one continually of Gibraltar, although of course infinitely less extensive. Particularly is this true of the "fortezza nuova," which it is well worth while to explore because of the fine view over the city and harbor to be had from its highest point. A custodian resides in a tiny cabin on the height and offers a perfectly needless telescope in the hope of fees, although it is doubtful that many ever care to supplement the eye by recourse to the glass. The prospect certainly is incomparably beautiful. Below lies the city with its narrow streets and lofty buildings, and before it the bay decked with white ships, contrasting with the almost incredible blue of the water, for the ocean is nowhere bluer than at Corfu. Across the straits not many miles away rises the bluff and mountainous mainland of Albania and Epirus, stretching off north and south into illimitable distances. Behind the town the country rolls away into most fertile swales and meadows, bounded on the far north by a high and apparently barren mountain. All the narrow southern end of the island is a veritable garden, well watered, well wooded, covered with grass and flowers, and rising here and there into low, tree-clad hills. Trim villas dot the landscape, and on a distant hill may be seen from afar the gleaming walls of the palace which belonged to the ill-fated Empress of Austria.

From the fortress southward toward the bay where lies the “ship of Ulysses,” there runs a beautiful esplanade along the water front, lined with trees and flanked on the landward side by villas with most luxuriant gardens. Even though the British occupation came to an end as long ago as 1865, the roadways of the island bear the marks of the British thoroughness, and make riding in Corfu a pleasure. The houses along the way are largely of the summer-residence variety, the property of wealthy foreigners rather than of native Corfiotes; and their gardens, especially in the springtime, are a riot of roses, tumbling over the high walls, or clambering all over the houses themselves, and making the air heavy with their fragrance. The trees are no less beautiful, and the roads are well shaded by them. After a month or so of the comparatively treeless and often barren mainland of Greece, this exuberant Eden is a source of keen enjoyment with its wanton profligacy of bloom.

“SHIP OF ULYSSES.” CORFU

It cannot be more than two miles, and perhaps it is rather less, over a smooth road and through a continuous succession of gardens, from the town of Corfu out to the little knoll which overlooks the bay and “ship of Ulysses,” and the view down on that most picturesque islet and across the placid waters of the narrow arm of the sea in which it lies, furnishes one of the most beautiful prospects in the island. The “ship” itself is a rather diminutive rock not far from shore, almost completely enshrouded in sombre, slender cypresses, which give it its supposed similarity to the Phæacian bark of the wily Ithacan. Nor is it a similarity that is entirely imaginary. Seen from a distance, the pointed trees grouped in a dark mass on this tiny isle do give the general effect of a vessel. Those who know the picture called the “Island of Death” will be struck at once with the similarity between the “ship” and the painter’s ideal of the abode of shades; and with the best of reasons, for it is said that this island was the model employed. Amidst the dusk of the crowded trees one may distinguish a monastery, tenanted we were told by a single monk, while on a neighboring island, closer to the shore and connected therewith by a sort of rocky causeway, there is another monastery occupied by some band of religious brothers. This island also is not without its charms, but the eye always returns to that mournful abandoned “ship,” which surpasses in its weird fascination any other thing that Corfu has to show.

The Villa Achilleion, which lies off to the southward on a lofty hill, shares with the ship of Ulysses the attention of the average visitor, and worthily so, not only because of the great beauty of the villa itself, with its mural paintings of classic subjects and its wonderful gardens, but because of the exquisite view that is to be had over the island from the spot. The lively verdure, the vivid blueness of the sea, and the gloomy rocks of the Turkish shore, all combine to form a picture not soon to be forgotten. As for the Achilleion itself, it was built for the Empress of Austria, who was assassinated some years ago, and the estate has now, I believe, passed into private hands. The road to it is excellent, and occasional bits of the scenery along the way are highly picturesque, with now and then an isolated and many-arched campanile, adorned with its multiple bells in the Greek manner, obtruding itself unexpectedly from the trees.

There are unquestionably many rides around the island that are quite as enjoyable as this, but the ordinary visitor is doubtless the one who stops over for a few hours only, during the stay of his steamer in the port, and therefore has little time for more than the sights described. Those who are able to make the island more than a brief way-station on the way to or from Greece express themselves as enchanted with it, and the number of attractive villas built by foreigners of means would seem to emphasize the statement. Corfu as an island is altogether lovely.

The city itself has already been referred to as more Italian than Greek in appearance. Nevertheless it is really Greek, and its shops are certainly more like those of Athens than like those of Italy, while the ordinary signboards of the street are in the Greek characters. It is the height of the houses, the narrowness of the streets, the occasional archways, and the fact that almost everybody can speak Italian, that give the unmistakable Italian touch to Corfu after one has seen the broader highways and lower structures of Athens. But Greco-Italian as it is, one cannot get away from the fact that, after all, it reminds one quite as much of Gibraltar as of anything. The town does this, quite as much as the fortresses, with its narrow ways and its evident cosmopolitanism. The shops, although devoted largely to Greek merchandise, are a good deal like the Gibraltar bazaars, and make quite as irresistible an appeal to the pocket, with their gorgeous embroidered jackets, blue and gold vestments, and other barbaric but incredibly magnificent fripperies, fresh from the tailor’s hand, and not, as at Athens, generally the wares of second-hand dealers. To see peasant jackets and vests of red and blue, and heavily ornamented with gold tracery, go to Corfu. Nothing at Athens approaches the Corfiote display.

There are some archæological remains at Corfu, but not of commanding prominence; and the average visitor, busied with the contemplation of the loveliness of the country and the quaintness of the town for a few brief hours, probably omits to hunt them up, as we ourselves did. The most obvious monuments of the past are those of the medieval period, the Venetian strongholds that served to protect Corfu when the island was an important bulwark against the Saracens. Of the days when the rival powers of classic Greece warred over the Corcyreans and their fertile island, little trace has survived. There is a very old tomb in the southerly suburb of Kastradès and the foundation of an ancient temple, but neither is to be compared for interest with the host of monuments of equal antiquity to be seen in Greece and even in Sicily. Corfu, like Italy, has suffered a loss of the evidences of her antiquity by being so constantly on the great highway to western Europe. She has never been left to one side, as Greece so long was. Her fertility prevented her degenerating into mere barren pasturage, as happened in Hellas proper, and her situation made her important all through the Middle Ages, just as it made her important during the expansion period of the Athenian empire. And as Rome, through active and continuous existence, has gradually eaten up her own ancient monuments before they achieved the value of great age, so Corfu has lost almost entirely all trace of what the ancient Corcyreans built; while Athens, through her long ages of unimportance, preserved much of her classic monumental glories unimpaired, and thanks to an awakened appreciation of them will cherish them for all time.

The long years in which Greece lay fallow and deserted now appear not to have been in vain. Through that period of neglect her ancient sites and monuments lay buried and forgotten, but intact. Men were too busy exploring and expanding elsewhere to waste a thought on the dead past. Even the revival of learning, which exhumed the classic writings from the oblivion of monkish cells and made the literature of Greece live again, was insufficient to give back to the world the actual physical monuments of that classic time. It has remained for the present day, when the earth has been all but completely overrun and when men have found a dearth of new worlds to conquer, that we have had the time and the interest to turn back to Greece, sweep away the rubbish of ages, and give back to the light of day the palaces of Agamemnon, the strongholds of Tiryns, and the hoary old labyrinth of Minos. On the fringes of Magna Græcia, where the empire was in touch with the unceasing tides of western civilization, as in Sicily and at Corfu, the remnants of the older days fared but ill. It was in the mountain fastnesses of the Peloponnesus and in the gloomy glens of Delphi that so much of the ancient, and even of the prehistoric and preheroic days, survived as to give us moderns even a more definite knowledge of the times of the Achæans and Trojans than perhaps even Homer himself had.