Corfu, Journal and Picture Album

“Marvellous things happen to one in Greece – marvellous good things which can happen to one nowhere else on earth”, Henry Miller – The Colossus of Maroussi

Corfu: “this brilliant little speck of an island in the Ionian”, Lawrence Durrell – Prospero’s Cell.

“The Greek Earth opens before me like the Book of Revelations….The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being.” Henry Miller – The Colossus of Maroussi

“Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder – the discovery of yourself”, Lawrence Durrell – Prospero’s Cell.

Corfu, The Boat Souvenir

“The sea’s curious workmanship: bottle green glass sucked smooth and porous by the waves: wood stripped and cleaned and bark swollen with salt…gnawed and rubbed: amber: bone: the sea”    Lawrence Durrell – Propero’s Cell

So, it was an unexpectedly early start that day and so began a routine of a balcony breakfast followed by a morning at the beach where we played for a while, then walked for a while searching for driftwood and other suitable model boat building materials washed up by the sea and then rested for a while listening to the occasional drone of an outboard motor, the flapping of pedalo paddle wheels and the gentle plop or rowing boat oars spearing the limpid sea until it was time to take shelter in the taverna and order a bottle of Mythos.

Read the full story…

Corfu, Reflection and Assessment

“No other spot on earth can be fuller of beauty and of variety of beauty”                                                                                                Edward Lear.

A week that started slowly with endless days of sunshine spent on an idyllic blue flag beach suddenly gathered pace in the final two days and they seemed to slip through our fingers with astonishing speed that we couldn’t decelerate until it was almost time to pack and return home and this was my opportunity to reflect and assess.

I had visited Corfu almost thirty years ago but although on that occasion I toured the island from north to south and from east to west I came as a holidaymaker rather than a traveller and I saw everything but didn’t see anything.

This visit jarred my memory and from what I can remember it hasn’t really changed a great deal at all – the Venetian elegance of Corfu town, the lush green vegetation of the interior, the twisting roads, the soaring mountains, the views that so enchanted Edward Lear and Henry Miller and the limestone ribbed bays where we spent our lazy days were all very much as I remembered them now and suddenly it didn’t really matter that I hadn’t paid attention to these details all those years ago because now my head and my camera were full to overflowing with all these unchanged images.

  

Previously I had stayed south of Corfu town in the resort of Perama where it turns out that Gerald Durrell lived with most of his family (his mother, brother and sister).  I say most of his family because although his book, ‘My Family and Other Animals’ would have the reader believe that he lived there with all his family it turns out that he didn’t live with older brother Lawrence at all.  Lawrence and his wife Nancy (and curiously Gerald doesn’t even mention her once in any of his Corfu books) lived here in Kalami in the White House which although claims an association with younger brother Gerald, it seems he never lived here at all.  In fact it is entirely possible that he only visited very infrequently and perhaps by sailing boat because Perama is over forty kilometres away and eighty years ago there were no asphalt roads or cars or even public transport that would have made an afternoon visit comfortably possible.

Gerald it seems was prone to extreme exaggeration and although his books are entertaining they miss the truth by a mile.  Actually I tired of them.  I enjoyed the first but the second was written over twenty years later when Gerald was in his fifties and had clearly lost touch with his childhood and with reality and I gave it up half way through.  He said himself that he didn’t enjoy writing them and only did so to make money to finance his naturalist expeditions and this I am afraid is blindingly obvious.

I much preferred the work of Lawrence with his sublime descriptions of life in Corfu (and equally curiously he doesn’t ever mention the other members of his family who lived here at the same time), a diary of elegant prose and vivid memories that for me at least bring the place to life.  How wonderful it must have been to live in this place all that time ago and experience a life of bohemian indulgence.

As for Henry Miller – I found the ‘Colossus of Maroussi’ rather self-indulgent and heavy going but whilst I have abandoned Gerald Durrell I will return to Miller.

I have one last comparison to make.  For ten years I have been in the habit of visiting the Cyclades Islands, specks of volcanic rock in the space between mainland Greece and Turkey and have gleefully declared them my favourites but now that I have been reunited with the Ionian Islands I have to reassess this opinion.  In ‘Prospero’s Cell’ Lawrence Durrell describes the sighting of a Cretan boat in the bay of Kalami and this seems to me to sum up perfectly the difference:

“The whole Aegean was written in her lines…. She had strayed out of the world of dazzling white windmills and grey, uncultured rock; out of the bareness and dazzle of the Aegean into our seventeenth-century Venetian richness. She had strayed from the world of Platonic forms into the world of decoration.”

No words of mine could improve on that wonderful comparison of the harsh, barren Cyclades and the soft, abundant Ionian.   So which do I prefer – impossible now to say, perhaps it may even be neither but the Dodecanese instead which is where I am bound for next – I will let you know when I return!

Decide for yourself … Read here about all my Greek Island visits…

Corfu, Greek Dancing

“Marvellous things happen to one in Greece – marvellous good things which can happen to one nowhere else on earth”           Henry Miller – The Colossus of Maroussi

The little scare with the weather passed by quite quickly as the grey clouds dispersed as quickly as they gathered, the wind disappeared and the previously agitated sea returned to normal which enabled us to return to our now familiar routine of beach and swimming pool.  The local people lamented the fact that it wasn’t going to rain but we of course were selfishly glad of that no matter how much the place needed precipitation.

In the evenings as the cicadas settled down we would walk through the twisting paths by the sun baked gardens and the flower beds of straining woody geraniums and sprawling succulents and back to the sea front where we ate in our favourite tavernas where good food was served by the attentive waiters and we could sit and listen to the sound of the sea and if the children didn’t fall asleep then we would finish at the hotel bar where there was nightly entertainment.

Whilst I am not an enthusiast of quizzes and karaoke a holiday in Greece is just not complete without going to a traditional Greek food and entertainment night and this really must include participative Greek dancing and one evening we were delighted to find Greek entertainment.  A real enthusiast will prepare for such an evening by purchasing a CD of Greek music to practice beforehand but this is not strictly necessary and all you really need to be able to do is to recognise the opening chords of ‘Zorba’s Dance’.

What you really need to do to get ready for a Greek night is:

• Abandon high culinary expectation
• Prepare yourself for copious amounts of cheap retsina
• Be prepared to make a complete fool of yourself on the dance floor
• Have your travel insurance documents handy, as they will be needed at the hospital.

In ancient Greece, dancing was believed to be the gift of the gods. Sacred dances were held as offerings to the deities, as commemorations of key events, and as a way of keeping communities together.

Most Greek dances are danced in a line and the line moves generally to the right and the person on the end with their right hand free is the leader.  Everyone else follows the leader who calls the steps that can be quite complicated.  Beginners are supposed to join the line at the end and it is considered bad manners to barge into the middle.  One of the most common dances at Greek party night is called the Zembekiko, or drunkard’s dance. After a few glasses of retsina this one is quite easy because it has no specific steps and involves stumbling around precariously to the rhythm of the music. In the Zembekiko there are several dancers down on one knee clapping around a particular dancer, and then they’ll swap places now and again. There are no rules. You can dance alone or join the clapping for someone else. As long as people are having fun, that is just fine.

The Greek night here in Corfu was good fun but the best that I have been to was in Mykonos in 2005, which was held in a rustic bar in a village in the hills and as well as the food and the wine and the dancing also had table dancing, setting fire to the floor with lighter fuel dancing and plate smashing.  Breaking plates is linked with the Greek concept of kefi, which is the spirit of joy, passion, enthusiasm, high spirits, or frenzy.  Some say that it wards off evil spirits, others that breaking plates symbolises good luck (especially for potters I should imagine).  Whatever it means it is a lot of good fun.

Breaking plates like this is now considered a dangerous practice due to flying shards, and perhaps also because of intoxicated tourists who have poor aim and may hit innocent bystanders. It is officially discouraged and in Greece, as well as in the United Kingdom and a bar or restaurant that wants to do it requires a license and probably has to satisfy a long list of EU regulations.   Tucked away in the hills, I doubt if this place had a license but it didn’t last long and they very quickly substituted the plates with paper napkins to throw around.  Mind you if you think plate smashing is dangerous in the old days they used to throw knives at the dancers feet as a sign of respect and manhood.  This was a bit reckless and not surprisingly, due to countless injuries, that tradition gradually changed to the present-day flower throwing alternative, which is a bit pansy but a whole lot safer.

As it got later the children tired so we returned to the room and the balcony which overlooked the bar and with a final ouzo listened to the pulsating beat of ‘Zorba’s Dance’ against a background of velvet sky with a scattering of stars all reflected in the placid sea where boats rested like fireflys on the water waiting for tomorrow’s adventure.

Corfu, Boat Ride to Kerkyra

“The architecture of the town is Venetian; the houses above the old port are built up elegantly into slim tiers with narrow alleys and colonnades running between them; red, yellow, pink, umber – a jumble of pastel shades which the moonlight transforms into a dazzling white city…”                                          Lawrence Durrell -“Prospero’s Cell”.

Travelling to Corfu town by speed boat seemed a much preferable option than taking the long tedious journey by bus all around the bay because even though it was rather expensive (€18 each but both children free) it only took twenty minutes.

The boat bounced over the gentle waves and we looked unsuccessfully for dolphins as the direct route to Corfu town bypassed all of the holiday resorts punctuating the horseshoe bay and then we passed the monstrous cruise ships in the harbour and shortly after that disembarked at a small jetty quite close to the old fortress.

The old town of Corfu with its pastel-hued, multi-storey Venetian styled shuttered buildings, peaceful squares, graceful arcades and swooping swifts was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2007 and stands on the broad part of a peninsula at the end of which the old Venetian citadel is cut off by a natural gully with a seawater moat.  To begin with we walked in the opposite direction along Arseniou, the old coastal road with the sea on one side and the elegant buildings on the other.

Corfu town is an odd mix of pretty streets and unappealing modern buildings and this is because sadly a lot of the town was destroyed in the Second-World-War when the Luftwaffe bombed Corfu as they grasped control from the Italian invaders following Italy’s surrender to the Allies.  The overall impression is that of a cosmopolitan and Italianate city so we picked out our photo opportunities carefully concentrating on the stylish mansions courtesy of the Venetians, the large public buildings and parks left there by the British and the esplanade thanks to the French and all looking faded, dilapidated but splendidly elegant framed by the big bold sky.

  

Suddenly we spotted a fairground ahead so before the children noticed it we deftly made a change of direction and disappeared into the mazy labyrinth of streets in the old town where shopkeepers pleaded with us to buy and waiters waved menu cards under our noses.  It seemed to me that Corfu was unusually quiet for the middle of high season and there was a lot of competition for tourist’s cash.

Eventually we found a café that we liked and stopped for ice cream and a drink before continuing our walk through the cobblestone streets and up and down the steep steps which sucked us towards the very centre.  Having been developed within the confines of the fortifications the old town is a warren of narrow streets, which, as we walked through them were sometimes hard work as they followed the gentle irregularities of the ground.  Except for the uneven surface it was quite safe however because most of the streets are just too narrow for modern vehicular traffic.

Finally we arrived at the focal point of the city, the tall, red domed church of Agios Spyridon where lies the mummified body of the patron saint of the island, Saint Spyridon and inside tourists jostled with Corfiots to push their way into a side chapel to visit his silver tomb.  “He lies in hibernating stillness in his richly wrought casket, whose outer shell of silver is permanently clouded by the breath of the faithful who stoop to kiss it” (Lawrence Durrell). Spyridon is so important to Corfu that apparently Spiros is even today the most common boys name on the island.

Emerging from the shady streets back into the sunshine we passed the Esplanade, once the exclusive place for nobles and important residents and the cricket pitch, which looked lush and green and out of place and is a quirky legacy of fifty years of British rule from 1814 to 1864 and where matches are still played today.  I don’t suppose many people would expect to find cricket being played in Greece but it was introduced in Corfu in April 1823 when a match was played between the British Navy and the local Army garrison. The Hellenic Cricket Federation was founded a hundred and seventy years later in 1996 when Greece became a member of the European Cricket Council and an affiliate member of the International Cricket Council.  There are now twenty-one cricket clubs in Greece, thirteen of which are based in Corfu and Greece competes annually in the European Cricket Championship despite being banned for a year in 2008 for cheating.

Back close to the harbour we completed our visit to Corfu town with a look inside the old fortress where there were some commanding views of the town, the island and the sea but the weather was beginning to change and from out of nowhere a strong wind whipped up the dust and started to rattle the pavement furniture so we made our way back to the jetty and sat and waited in a taverna for the speed boat and the return journey.  The wind continued to get stronger and a concerned owner came outside several times to examine his umbrellas which seemed to be going through some sort of pre take off routine.  The sea was getting rougher and I began to worry about the ride back.

The boat arrived and it looked rather flimsy bobbing about in the water as the hissing wind whipped up meringue peaks on the waves whilst overhead in the sky a fleet of steel grey battleships chased away the flotilla of dainty white sailing boats that scattered towards Albania but clearly the skipper was happy to make the journey and we set off back to Kalami.  I was confident in his nautical abilities but I also hoped that Saint Spyridon was watching over us because amongst all his other responsibilities he is also the patron saint of sailors, protecting them from shipwrecks and helping them to safe harbour during storms.

When I was a boy my parents used to take me now and again to a place called Wicksteed Park near Kettering in Northamptonshire where there were a few rides and attractions including a water chute where a flat bottomed boat was winched up a launch pad and then released into the water and if you happened to be at the wrong place at the right time then you could get a complete drenching and that of course was the whole point of taking the ride.  Well, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time today because only a few minutes out at sea the boat hit a large wave and water cascaded over the side and although people on either side of me remained dry I caught the lot and got a thorough drenching!  At the end of the ride back the skipper apologised several times which was quite unnecessary and then gave me a refund for getting me wet which I thought was a nice gesture so we went to a taverna by the sea shore and spent it on Mythos.

__________________________________________________

Some more of my boat journeys recorded in the journal:

Malta Tony-Oki-Koki

Corfu-1984 Georges Boat

Rowing Boat on Lake Bled in Slovenia

A Boat Ride with Dolphins in Croatia

A Boat Ride with Dolphins in Wales

Gondola Ride in Venice

Captain Ben’s Boat in Anti Paros

__________________________________________________

Corfu, Big Bug Hunting and Routine

“The Greek Earth opens before me like the Book of Revelations….The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being.”                                                  Henry Miller – The Colossus of Maroussi

It was my own fault for not checking before booking but the only thing that let the accommodation down was the lack of air-conditioning that we have all become used to which meant having to use excessive quantities of mosquito repellent before going to bed, a couple of electric plug-ins by the bed side and sleeping with the balcony windows open which was quite safe because we were on the third floor of a cliff face but this of course didn’t stop flying things from dropping by to join us.

Early one morning I was woken by a calamitous din which sounded as though someone was using a pneumatic drill inside the apartment and I leapt out of bed to see what on earth was happening and there clinging to the net curtains was a shiny cicada looking as though someone had coloured it in with a luminous green highlighter pen.  It was belting out its first screeching song of the day and the sound echoed around the tiled surfaces of the apartment.  The noise was awesome but it did at least stop as I approached it and gave it a closer examination.

It was a weird looking beast, like something from an alien world with gently waving antenna on its head, bulging eyes on the top of its fat ugly head, translucent wings and six legs each with a hooky thing at the end by which it remained firmly attached to the curtain.  I didn’t seem to alarm it at all and it peered at me as if to taunt me about I might intend to deal with it.  If you believe the exaggerated tales of Gerald Durrell in ‘My Family and Other Animals’ I would have followed his brave example now and scooped the thing up without any fear and then released it but then I’m not that brave and I don’t actually believe that  the ten year old Gerald Durrell was either.

I flicked the curtain to try and dislodge him and out onto the balcony but this first plan backfired badly as it jumped the other way into the apartment and onto the table.  I pursued it and it leapt onto the kitchen worktop and it turned out to be much more nimble than me because every time I got close it just quickly moved position until it made the fatal mistake of going into the bathroom and landing on a plastic make up bag and unable to get a grip on the greasy contents fell inside.  Rather like James Bond I was totally fearless now that it was trapped and I closed the top between my fingers and carried it out to the balcony at arms length where I released it and invited it to fly away but it refused to go over the side and instead jumped backwards and attached itself to the back of a patio chair from where it refused to budge.

At least it was outside so I closed the balcony doors and went back to bed certain that it would soon be gone.  Well, as soon as it had recovered from the ordeal of the chase it started its tymbal racket once again and there was no chance of sleeping through this so I was dispatched back outside to do the job of shutting it up properly.  These things can live for up to seventeen years so I didn’t want to harm it but there was no easy way of dislodging it so I had to hang the chair over the balcony and shake it violently until it finally got the message and dropped off to the ground below where it promptly started to screech again!

So, it was an unexpectedly early start that day and so began a routine of a balcony breakfast followed by a morning at the beach where we played for a while, then walked for a while searching for driftwood and other suitable model boat building materials washed up by the sea and then rested for a while listening to the occasional drone of an outboard motor, the flapping of pedalo paddle wheels and the gentle plop or rowing boat oars spearing the limpid sea until it was time to take shelter in the taverna and order a bottle of Mythos.

In the afternoons we would visit the swimming pool and then rest and for the first three days this is how we arranged our time as the days went by slowly in a time loop of glorious weather, children amusing activities and taverna dining.

It’s strange how the first few days of a holiday seem to go by slowly but by the middle of the week we thought we ought to do something different so that evening I purchased tickets for a speed boat trip to Corfu town on the other side of the bay and we looked forward to breaking our routine on the following day.

Corfu, In the Footsteps of Lawrence and Gerald Durrell

Corfu: ”this brilliant little speck of an island in the Ionian”                           Lawrence Durrell – ‘Prospero’s Cell’

It had been almost thirty years since my first visit to Corfu so I convinced myself that a return was long overdue.  This time I chose to stay at the village of Kalami, north of Corfu Town and where the English author Lawrence Durrell once lived so I thought it appropriate preparation for the holiday to read some of his work and also that of his brother Gerald ( ‘My Family and Other Animals’) and also Henry Miller who wrote about his stay on the island in 1939 in ‘The Colossus of Maroussi’.

Well, the arrival on the island was no different at all and the plane flew in over the resort of Perama, where I had stayed previously and dad had sat for hours watching the planes come in, over Pontikonisi Island.  This is the home of the monastery of Pantokrator whose white staircase resembles (from afar) a mouse’s tail and is the reason the island has acquired its popular name of Mouse Island.  Then over the ‘chessboard fields’ of the Venetian salt marshes before landing on the freshly ploughed runway which gave everyone on board a rough welcome to the island and through the window I could see the same hopelessly inadequate buff coloured and tired airport terminal as the plane came to a gentle stop as the engines slowed from a high pitched whine to a gentle hum.

It was good to be in Greece again, especially so because the unpredictable English Summer had this year so far been entirely predictable with the wettest April on record, the wettest May on record, the wettest June on record and so on and so on and it was wonderful therefore to step out of the aircraft and cast off the gloom of the lost English summer and walk out onto tarmac that was hot and breathless with heat rising from the concrete like shimmering waves and after a dreadful start to the year I immediately wanted to reach down and scoop some up to keep for later.

Passport control was as casual as it ever is in Greece and the police showed customary disinterest in our documents so after passing through the arrivals hall we were soon on board our coach for transfer to our hotel.  At first the driver made slow progress through the growling traffic of the outskirts of the busy city with boxcrete apartment blocks with peeling facades, sagging washing lines and precarious balconies all decorated with satellite dishes and television aerials but eventually he nudged his way through the traffic and we were on the scenic coastal road that took us through Gouvia, Dassia and Ipsos and towards the mountainous north of the island where the road climbed in extravagant sweeping hairpin bends up one side of the coastal mountains and then down the other side.

The forty-kilometre journey took much longer than I imagined it would but eventually we arrived at Kalami and after a transfer to a hotel mini-bus for the final leg of the journey we were soon at our accommodation, the Asonitis and Adonis apartments where we waited for a while in a lift shaft and I began to get that feeling of ‘have I made a mistake here?’

I shouldn’t have worried because eventually we were shown to our rooms and although they were basic in the way that I have come to expect in Greece this was more than compensated for by the magnificent view from the balcony which overlooked the crescent shaped bay like a Saracen’s sword, pine fringed with limestone layer cake rocks, boats lolling in the languid water and the White House ‘set like a dice on a rock already venerable with the scars of wind and water’ of Lawrence Durrell.

At this moment if someone had tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to pay a bit extra for this view I would gladly have done so because laid out in front of me was the silvery blush of olive trees, a cornflower blue sea, the smoky lifeless hills of Albania set against a chorus of cicadas chattering in the twisted branches of the black olive trees and the cracking of seed pods in the midday heat of the sun.  It was breathtaking, it was wonderful, I was glad to be here!

It had been a long time  but it was almost exactly as I remembered it but a lot more like Croatia than I knew before and quite unlike the Cyclades with which I have become familiar – red and ochre tiled roofs like the colour of the soil, soaring ragged cypress trees, stony white pebbled beaches and the same soft blue of the Adriatic Sea and the sky and I concluded that I could appreciate it all the more for what I know now that I didn’t thirty years before.

Would the Durrell’s recognise this even after eighty years or so? Yes I think they would, even though it is a holiday resort it is nicely understated, no commercialism, no silly beach attractions, good traditional tavernas and views of ravishing beauty.  Lawrence himself might even recognise the White House although it has been restored of course because during the Second-World-War the Germans saw fit to bomb it for some pointless reason.

After we had settled into our rooms with the sun on our shoulders for what seemed the first time this year we took the steps down to the sea to set about establishing a routine for the week ahead…

___________________________________________________

Related articles:

In the Footsteps of Henry Miller

The Greek Islands

___________________________________________________

Corfu 1984, George’s Boat and Water Skiing

“Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder – the discovery of yourself”             Lawrence Durrell – ‘Prospero’s Cell’

After three days we returned the car and went back to the routine of the first week with long days around the swimming pool, sunset drinks on the hotel terrace and seeking out different tavernas for evening meals.  Some days when we tired of the pool we visited the scruffy beach which was across a busy main road and through a gloomy underpass, which we rarely used, preferring instead to take our chances against the traffic.

Read the full story…

Corfu 1984, Red Jeep around the island

Corfu: ”this brilliant little speck of an island in the Ionian”                           Lawrence Durrell – ‘Prospero’s Cell’

In the middle of the holiday we hired a flame red open top jeep for three days and set about visiting other parts of the island.  Perama is just about right in the centre of the island so this was a good place to begin the day trips out.  On the first day we went north bypassing Corfu town on the way and driving along the main island road along the eastern side of the island through the seaside towns of Gouvia, Dassia, Ipsos and Pyrgi, stopping frequently and finally arriving at the town of Kassiopi.

Read the full story…

Corfu 1984, Perama and Corfu Town

I visited the Greek island of Corfu in the summer of 1984 and this was my second visit to Greece in a short time following a holiday on the island of Kos the previous year.  Corfu is the second largest of the Ionian Islands after Cephalonia which are situated to the east of the mainland and are more similar in appearance to the Croatian islands to the north than to the Cyclades or the Dodecanese.  The northern part lies off the coast of Albania, from which it is separated by straits varying from three to twenty-three kilometres wide, while its southern coast lies off the coast of Thesprotia, Greece.

In the 1980s Corfu was expanding rapidly as a tourist destination and was acquiring a reputation as a party island and magnet for badly behaving British tourists on boozy Club 18-30 holidays who were drawn in the main to the hedonistic town of Benitses which was well known for heavy drinking, wild behaviour and street fighting.  There was a story at the time that even the island police were frightened to go in there after dark but I am not sure if this was really true.

We were staying at a modern hotel complex called the Aeolos Beach Hotel about ten kilometres north of Benitses at the resort of Perama, which was only a short distance from the capital Kerkyra and the airport.  So close to the airport in fact that we could sit and watch the aircraft in the final seconds of descent and imminent landing which kept dad amused for the entire fortnight.  The hotel was an unattractive concrete structure with a main building with restaurant, bar and shops and the accommodation was in a string of bedroom blocks that were located amongst pretty bougainvillea shrubs in the large hotel gardens.  It was in quite a good spot, elevated and with good views over the sea and across to Albania and overlooking Pontikonisi Island, the home of the monastery of Pantokrator whose white staircase resembles (from afar) a mouse’s tail and is the reason the island acquired its popular name of Mouse Island from this perceived architectural quirk.

We didn’t stray far from the hotel for the first few days and enjoyed lazy times in the hot sun sitting on the hotel terrace and taking frequent cool-off dips in the big swimming pool.  At lunch time we would wander off in search of a taverna for Greek salad, do nothing in the afternoon and in the evenings spend a few moments on the first floor terrace bar with a beer watching the sun go down before finding somewhere nearby for evening meal.

After a few days of lethargic inactivity we inevitably began to get restless so it was time to get out and about and our first excursion was a bus ride into the capital.  Due to its geographical position Corfu has had a turbulent history and has entertained many foreign rulers, the Romans, the Venetians, Ottoman Turks, French and British before eventual unification with modern Greece in 1864.  A legacy of these struggles is demonstrated in the number of castles and fortresses punctuating strategic locations across the island. Two of these castles enclose the capital, which is the only city in Greece to be surrounded in such a way and as a result has been officially declared a Kastropolis (Castle city) by the Greek Government.

The old town of Corfu with its pastel-hued, multistorey Venetian styled shuttered buildings, peaceful squares and  elegant arcades was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2007 and stands on the broad part of a peninsula at the end of which the old Venetian citadel is cut off by a natural gully with a seawater moat.  Having been developed within the confines of the fortifications the old town is a labyrinth of narrow cobblestoned streets, which, as we walked through them were sometimes hard work as they follow the gentle irregularities of the ground.  Except for the uneven surface it was quite safe however because most of the streets are just too narrow for modern vehicular traffic.  Traditional tourist transport was another matter of course and the girls took a ride in a horse drawn carriage while we declined and stayed behind with a beer.

Corfu town is an eclectic mix of pretty streets and unappealing modern buildings and this is because sadly a lot of the town was destroyed in the Second-World-War when the Luftwaffe bombed Corfu as they grasped control from the Italian invaders following Italy’s surrender to the Allies but we enjoyed it anyway and walked around the old town with its elegant Venetian style mansions, the busy marina with its collection of boats and visited the cricket pitch, which is a quirky legacy of fifty years of British rule from 1814 to 1864 and where matches are still played today.

I don’t suppose many people would expect to find cricket being played in Greece but it was introduced in Corfu in April 1823 when a match was played between the British Navy and the local Army garrison. The Hellenic Cricket Federation was founded a hundred and seventy years later in 1996 when Greece became a member of the European Cricket Council and an affiliate member of the International Cricket Council.  There are now twenty-one cricket clubs in Greece, thirteen of which are based in Corfu and Greece competes annually in the European Cricket Championship despite being banned for a year in 2008 for cheating.