Vacation days in Greece

by Rufus B. Richardson

But, first, to be just to the present Corfu. The traveller who has never been east of Italy, which was my case at the time of my first visit in 1890, feels that he is here passing for the first time the bounds between Europe and the Orient. The streets and squares of the city, which contains a population of about 30,000—about one-third of the population of the whole island—swarm with figures clad in the most wonderful costumes, men and women vying with one another in display of colors. The Corfiotes themselves contribute largely to this display of costumes. From across the narrow strait come from Epirus many Albanians, with their big white skirts and their kingly air, some for trade and a quick return, and some for a longer stay. From the same quarter come the no less picturesque people, partly Greek and partly Wallachian—but who can give the component parts of the blood of these people of Epirus?—who, having attempted to secure the consummation of what the Congress of Berlin decreed, incorporation with Greece, were treated as Turks usually treat insurgents, and were then living as refugees in Corfu, awaiting the hour when Moslem rule shall recede from the shores of Europe. Some of these men’s costumes are ragged and dirty, but with what an air the men walk in them. It is not a swagger, but a king’s gait. A well-dressed European gentleman can as little compete with these men for attention as the Berlin palace can compete with the picturesque ruins of Heidelberg. The clergy, who seem numerous enough here to preach the Gospel to every creature, with their long black gowns and high stiff caps, make quite a feature in the throng. The military officers are also numerous and brilliantly dressed, but are too much like ordinary Europeans to attract particular notice.

The vegetation here is also Oriental—oranges, lemons, figs, forests of cactus and giant aloes abound. The four or five million olive-trees, many sixty feet high, are the characteristic features of the island. They form a beautiful background for the tall, dark-green cypresses. But the vine presses hard upon the olive. It is great good fortune to be here in the time of the grape harvest, even if one must miss the oranges and the olives. One day in September I walked to Palæokastritza, an old cloister on a rock looking out on the Ionian Sea, sixteen miles from the city. The way was through a continuous vineyard full of laborers. At this season of the year there is hardly a drop of running water in the island. There are places where springs and brooks and even rivers have been and will be again, but there are none there now. The water in the wells and cisterns looks suspicious. But one has a substitute for water that is just about as cheap. For copper coin of the value of two cents a woman gave me a pile of grape clusters, enough for four men. On my return I managed to signify with my poor Greek to a man riding on a load of grapes that I would like to change places with him. For three miles I rode stretched out on the top of crates full of grapes, resting my tired feet, eating, by the permission of the driver, from the top of the crates, while from the bottom the precious juice oozed out and trickled into the dusty road. I felt that I was playing Dionysos. Then it was that the vintagers, many women and few men, came trooping picturesquely from the fields. They looked so happy that it seemed as if the contagion of joy rested in the vine. It seemed as if a touch of music would have converted them into a Dionysiac chorus.

If Corfu had no classical history, it would still be historically interesting. It has been spared that curse which rested so long on the rest of Greece—Turkish occupation. The Turks dashed their forces in vain in two memorable sieges against its rock forts. The high degree of culture here, as compared with the rest of Greece, outside of Athens, is partly due to this exemption. But there have been stimulating influences from without. Rome, Byzantium, Naples, Venice, and England have held sway here. The rule of Venice, to which the Corfiotes gave themselves voluntarily, as they had formerly done to Rome, lasted nearly six hundred years, with the interruption of the Anjou episode. This rule was mild and beneficent. It was the Venetians who built the fortifications which kept off the Turks, and which still form, though to a less degree than twenty-five years ago, the characteristic feature in the aspect of the city.

From Waterloo to 1864 England exercised a protectorate over this and the six other Ionian Islands. Ten successive Lord High Commissioners, of whom Gladstone was one, and whose monuments profusely deck the esplanade, represented here the majesty of England. The English built the present fine system of roads—paid for, of course, in Ionian money. A kindly feeling prevails toward England because she yielded to the strong desire of the inhabitants for union with the kingdom of Greece. But the fact that the English, on their departure, blew up the principal fortification of the harbor on the island Vido, and carried away all the guns from the other forts, left a sting. The dismantled fort was paid for in Ionian money, but the exigencies of European politics demanded the dismantling. Austria had as much to say about that as England. But, sweeping away the name of Corfu, which arose in the Middle Ages, and transferring ourselves back of all this foreign occupation and centuries of semi-barbarism, let us introduce ourselves to the Greek Kerkyra of Thucydides. Passing southward, a half a mile or so from the esplanade of the present city, one comes along an isthmus between two old harbors to an elevated peninsula, on which now stands the King’s villa in a beautiful garden. Here one is overpowered by historic associations. Here lay the proud Greek colony established by Corinth in 734 B.C., a colony that first set the example of filial ingratitude, and, feeling itself stronger than the mother city, joined battle with her and defeated her in the first great naval battle of Greeks against Greeks, in 665 B.C. From this rising ground the eye dimly discerns in the distance, near the mainland opposite the southern end of the island, the Sybota Islands, where the later great naval battle between mother city and colony in the presence of an Athenian fleet gave the occasion for the dreadful Peloponnesian war. From this inner harbor, now abandoned and still, nearly silted up and yearly submitting to the encroachment of vines upon its borders, the proud fleet of Alcibiades and Nicias sailed for Syracuse. It was the alliance with Kerkyra, the key to the voyage to Sicily, that lured the Athenians to that ruin.

Little of this Kerkyra remains above ground. Perhaps much may yet be found below. About twelve years ago excavations by Carapanos laid bare a great quantity of terra-cottas. Perhaps it was a terra-cotta manufactory that he discovered. The ruins of an old Doric temple lie on the surface of the ground near a spring in an olive grove on the side of the peninsula looking toward the mainland. The situation, 100 feet above the strait, among the olives and near an ancient fountain, makes one feel that he could have joined in doing honor to the dryads and naiads with the throng that used to meet here. One of the antiquarians of Corfu has lately advanced the view that these remains are those not of a temple but of a bath. Blessed bathers!

It was not bad taste for the King of Greece to put his gardens on the spot of the Gardens of Alkinoos. If I were King of Greece I would try to compound with my subjects to take the business of ruling off my hands and let me keep my Corfu home. It is no wonder that Elizabeth, the Empress of Austria, sought relief from her troubles in her villa on the other side of the inner harbor.

When a part of the Venetian works was being removed in 1843, where the isthmus between the two old harbors joins the present city, there was found a circular monument about twenty feet in diameter, ending in a flat cone, and containing an inscription running almost around the layer of stones just below the coping. It reads thus: “This is the monument of Menekrates, son of Tlasias, of Œantheia by birth. The people erected it in his memory, “for he served them well as proxenos” (consul) “and he perished in the sea.” This with more, making six hexameters, now much more obscured than when first discovered and copied, I made out by the help of a manual of epigraphy in the rays of the sun just rising over the mountains of Epirus. The archaic forms of the letters make it a remarkable inscription, which may be dated as far back as 600 B. C. As I read this inscription, a century older than the Persian war, and two centuries before Thucydides, I thought, here surely one is in contact with Greek antiquity.

The next day, in an upper room of the building used for both library and high school, in company with the director, Professor Romanos, and Professor Papageorgios, a gentleman who deserves the title philoxenos, I read the other inscriptions of Corfu which have not been lost in the labyrinths of the British Museum or elsewhere. Some of these are of about the same age as that on the Menekrates monument, but very clear as well as exceedingly interesting on account of the old forms of the letters. They are mostly tomb inscriptions, telling of the grief which all the world has felt over the loss of the brave and the good.