Postcards from Kephalonia

In the first half of 2000 work was getting onerous and less enjoyable and I was beginning to lose my enthusiasm for working for a company (Onyx UK) that was financed by public taxes but was providing an ever deteriorating level of service.  I had a new boss who I didn’t get on with and I needed a holiday so at the beginning of June I went to the Ionian island of Kefalonia with mum and dad and son Jonathan.  As it happened it turned out to be the last time that I went away with dad because he became too ill to travel soon after that.

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Kefalonia, Fiskardo and Assos

The north part of Kefalonia is the most wild and rugged and at the very northern tip is the town of Fiskardo which was the only place on the island that wasn’t flattened by the earthquake.  We set off straight after breakfast and after by-passing Argostoli drove through the village of Farsa, which was desperately unremarkable and would have been completely unrecognisable to poor old Captain Corelli.

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Kefalonia, Villages and Beaches

We drove south past the airport and the further we got away from Argostoli and the tourist strip of Lassi the more we saw the devastation caused by the earthquake.  All along the road there were abandoned villages and houses and buildings that were destroyed by the quake and just waiting for time to take over and their turn to fall over completely.  The 1953 disaster caused huge destruction, with only regions in the north escaping the heaviest tremors and that is the only part of the island where houses remained intact.

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Kefalonia, Argostoli

After the day of inactivity yesterday we decided today to get out of the hotel and see some more of the island so after breakfast we set off for the capital, Argostoli, just a short distance away.  We could have caught a bus but took the easier option of a taxi instead for the short ten minute ride to town where we were dropped off at the deserted main square.

Argostoli, it has to be said, was an immediate disappointment. Old photographs show that it was once bursting with stylish Venetian mansions, leafy squares and elegant bell towers, but first the Germans dropped incendiary bombs on it during World War Two and then an earthquake in 1953 reduced what was left to a wasteland of rubble and only two houses and a bridge survived.

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Kefalonia, Lassi and Hotel Mediterranee

In the first half of 2000 work was getting onerous and less enjoyable and I was beginning to lose my enthusiasm for working for a company (Onyx UK) that was financed by public taxes but was providing an ever deteriorating level of service.  I had a new boss who I didn’t get on with and I needed a holiday so at the beginning of June I went to the Ionian island of Kefalonia with mum and dad and Jonathan.  As it happened it turned out to be the last time that I went away with dad because he became too ill to travel soon after that.

Read the full story…