Corfu and the Village of Benitses

“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

We continued our tour around the island by driving south of Corfu Town to some of the early holiday destinations on the island.

We quickly left the rugged mountainous of the north east where the bare granite slopes of Mount Pantokrator rise steeply before plunging dramatically into the sea to where, although only a few miles away, the flat and sandy south east where tall cypresses march in columns down green fertile slopes to the shore.

In 1984 I stayed in the village of Perama at a modern hotel complex called the Aelos Beach Hotel which was only a short distance from the main town.    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.  We drove past it today and it is now a modern beach resort, very up-market and most likely beyond my budget.

Lots of visitors get drawn to Perama now because this is where the Durrell family lived in the 1930s.

We didn’t stop because we were heading for the next village of Benitses.

In the 1980s Corfu was expanding rapidly as a tourist destination and was acquiring an uneviable reputation as a party island and magnet for unruly British tourists on boozy Club 18-30 holidays.   They were drawn in the main to the hedonistic town of Benitses which was well known for heavy drinking, beach parties, 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.

In 1984 we drove straight through, not daring to stop but at ten o’clock in the morning it was still recovering from the night before and didn’t live up to its dangerous reputation at all, no dead bodies or burnt out cars and we went through entirely without incident on our way to the north of the island.

Over the next twenty years or so the locals who lived in the village grew tired of its  reputation and ill-disciplined guests and made a determined effort to throw off its bad ill-repute.  Benitses set about reinventing itself with the addition of a swanky marina, up-market hotels and a string of classy bars and tavernas.  The rowdy youngsters were carefully redirected to Kavos in the the far south of the island where they were kept as far away as possible from families and the mostly well behaved.

Kavos must have been delighted because in a 2017 survey it was in the top ten of European destinations that are spoiled by boozy Brits.  The others (in no particular order) were Ayia Napa in Cyprus; Red Sea resorts in Bulgaria; Magaluf, Barcelona and Benidorm in Spain; Malia in Crete, Riga in Latvia and Hvar in Croatia.  Such surveys make me ashamed to be British.

In 1984 I confess that we contributed to this a little bit and this I my Mum after way too much local retsina wine and most likely a glass or two of ouzo as well…

I am happy to report that things are quite different today in Benitses and we had no fear of parking the car and taking a stroll along the waterfront next to the marina and the thin shingle beach before stopping for mid-morning coffee.

And that could have been it, we were ready to leave and move on but we spotted a half-hidden sign pointing to the old village so we decided to explore a little.

Benitses it turns out has a long and interesting history stretching all the way back to the Roman occupation two thousand years ago and we took the narrow path that climbed into a lush green valley with interesting buildings and intriguing lanes and as far as the village church basking in the sunshine at the very centre.

Some scholars suggest that Corfu is the setting for the William Shakespeare play The Tempest.  He did, after all, go missing for a long time and presumed travelling in Italy and the Adriatic so this is not completely unlikely and the path took us through an olive grove with gnarled black trunks twisting away like Chubby Checker and each with a knotted witch hiding in the branches and all rather like walking through Act 4, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Can you spot the white faced witch…

I was glad that we had stopped off in Benitses and had found it so delightful and hospitable, it is always good to have previous prejudices and misunderstandings corrected. I am no longer going to tell stories about fighting and boozing in the streets of Benitses but rather about charming flower fringed streets, local people pleased to welcome us and an enchanting and polite seaside resort and village.

We left Benitses and made the short journey to the nearby Achilleion Palace.

Click on an image to view the Gallery…

The Durrells of Corfu

In my opening Corfu post I mentioned that I had prepared for the visit by reading Gerald Durrell’s ‘My Family and Other Animals’ which forms a sort of Corfiot trilogy alongside brother Laurence’s ‘Prospero’s Cell’ and Henry Miller’s ‘The Colossus of Marousi’  all written about many of the same places, and often the same people, but from very different perspectives.

Read the full story here…

A Walk Through Corfu Town

Outside and around the church there were old fashioned stores selling various cheap cards or slightly more expensive pieces of pressed aluminium each with a picture of a part of the body.

The explanation is that if you have a bad knee then you buy a leg picture, a poorly arm an elbow picture, a hangover a brain picture and so on and then you take this to the Church and ask for a cure and then leave it there securely fastened in bunches to railings and picture frames so that God or Jesus or whoever doesn’t just forget about it seconds after you have gone.

In return for this service it is the custom to light a candle and leave it flickering at the door.  Six foot candles were burning away with such intensity it might have been what it was like to be caught in the middle of the Great Fire of London.  It all looked rather dangerous to me but there were men on hand whose job it was to extinguish the flames as soon as the worshipper that had left it there was an appropriate distance away down the street and then whisk the unburned portion away for immediate recycling and to cut down and sell later to another pilgrim!

Emerging from the shady streets back into the sunshine we passed the Esplanade, once the exclusive place for nobles and important residents and then the cricket pitch, which looked lush and green and rather out of place in this dry dusty town 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 to Corfu in 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.

Never mind Captain Cook or Clive of India or Cecil Rhodes, it seems to me that Cricket is probably the most important legacy of the British Empire.  Currently 104 of 193 World Countries have some sort of affiliation to the International Cricket Council. For some reason that I cannot explain there are 211 football countries (?) affiliated to FIFA.  There are about twenty countries that play the pointless game of US Rounders  Baseball.

I certainly wouldn’t park my car that close to the boundary especially in a T20 match…

Close to the harbour we completed our visit to Corfu town with a look inside the old fortress where we wandered around the lower levels where, to be honest there wasn’t a lot to see because seventy- five years ago the German army destroyed most of it to celebrate the end of their occupation of the island.

So then we tackled the long climb to the top where there were some impressive 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 left, crossed the canal moat and head once more to the centre of the town where we passed a memorial to the two thousand Jews of Corfu who were deported from the island during the Nazi occupation.

Everywhere in Europe from Iberia to the Baltic to the Balkans we stumble across these sad stories.  In June 1944 the Corfiot Jews were told to present themselves the next morning at the old Fort. When they heard the ultimatum, some escaped to the countryside but most did as they had been told.  There, the Nazis forced them to hand over their possessions and subsequently they were led to the prison inside the Fortress.

The incarceration at the jail of the castle, under horrible conditions and without rudimentary amenities lasted for some time until finally they were transported to concentration camps in Eastern Europe.

Out of the two thousand that were forced to leave Corfu only one hundred and twenty eventually returned.  Let me say that again.  Out of the two thousand that were forced to leave Corfu only one hundred and twenty eventually returned.  I love Europe, I love being a European but when it comes to war and genocide, Europe has a lot to answer for.

It is facts like these that can make me feel temporarily uncomfortable as we nonchalantly drift through history in sandals and shorts enjoying our holidays and our travels, stopping for a coffee or a beer or a cocktail but then occasionally uncovering unpleasant pieces of information that serve to remind that times were not always so good.  Let us hope that we learn from history this time because we haven’t been so good at that previously.

Back now in the cramped shopping streets and back alleys the Kim and Margaret did some souvenir and gift shopping and then to the other side of the town to the New Fortress.

There was a long climb to the entrance and seeing a pay kiosk I was prepared for another entrance fee but bizarrely there was no one there to collect money and a sign in the window saying free admission between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon.  It didn’t explain what the arrangements were if you wanted to visit outside of these hours!

A photograph taken in 1984…

The New Fortress was built by the Venetians to compliment the older one and it was completed by the British during the Protectorate period.  The British liked building fortresses in other people’s countries and also constructed some elaborate sea defences but rather like the Germans in 1944 they blew these up when they left when Corfu was handed over to the new Greek State in 1863.

It was a long hot walk but it was worth the effort for the views from the top of the battlements and from the flat roof of the old barracks and on balance (and I am not just saying this because it was free entrance) I think the New Fortress was more interesting to visit than the Old.

So we made our way back to the jetty and sat and waited in a friendly taverna under wildly flapping parasols 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 get nervous 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 of course 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.

Another picture from 1984…

Boat Ride to Corfu Town

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 good option rather than taking the long tedious journey by car all around the bay because even though it was rather expensive (€23 each) 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 and modern concrete hotels that punctuate the horseshoe bay below Mount Pantokrator and then passed below the monstrous cruise ships  in the harbour which seemed almost as tall as the mountain and shortly after that we 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 and graceful arcades was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2007.

History has left the Ionian isles with a fascinating cultural legacy, the result of Corinthian, Byzantine, Venetian, French and British influences that extend from architecture to cuisine, English breakfasts, lunchtime pasta and fine French evening dining.

Corfu Town boasts the stateliest of Neoclassical buildings, legacy of the nineteenth century British Protectorate of the Ionian islands. Earlier during two short spells of Napoleonic occupation the French left their mark. This influence is best seen in the arcaded Liston, a tribute to Rue de Rivoli in Paris and a sun-drenched venue for sipping coffee and people-watching.  Before all this, the Venetians bequeathed all of the Ionian islands a distinctive landscape of Italianate buildings, silver-leafed olive trees and grape-heavy vines.

Margaret and Kim explore the old town…

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 himself, and inside tourists jostled with Corfiots to push their way into a tiny side chapel to visit his heavily embossed silver tomb where “…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).

We passed through the heavy doors into an alternative world of black robed beardy priests, local worshippers and travelling pilgrims all lining up to kiss the lavish icons of their favourite Saint.

I don’t know for sure if this was a special day in Corfu for Saint Spyridon but I suspect it might have been because inside the place was so busy it resembled the first day of the Oxford Street January sales and people were pushing and shoving and waiting in a long line for their turn to visit the silver casket and to make a request for a miracle cure or for the winning lottery numbers.  And the queue wasn’t moving very quickly because having stood in line for so long the pilgrims had plenty of time to draw up an expanding list of requests and having finally made it to the front no one was inclined to rush the experience of an audience with the preserved corpse and everyone seemed to stand around for eternity kissing the icons and the casket and saying personal prayers.

All of this icon kissing means quite a lot of unwanted spit and saliva of course so to deal with this cleaning ladies with spray cleaners and dusters circulated constantly to wipe away the slobber and the germs on a continuous and never ending polishing circuit of the church.

After almost two thousand years the preserved relics are not in great shape and the right hand is missing altogether because that is in Rome, so the mummified skin and bone is covered in a sort of embroidered carpet, I assume so that it doesn’t scare the children half to death!

Spyridon is a very important to Corfu who at various times is said to have saved the island from foreign invaders and from outbreaks of deadly disease and because he does his best to try and deliver on the requests of the visitors to his tomb.  He is so important to Corfiots that apparently Spiros is even today the most common boys name on the island.

This is my favourite story – it is said that at night when everyone is gone and the town is empty he rises from the silver sarcophagus and walks the streets of Corfu granting people’s wishes.  Every year he wears out a perfectly good pair of shoes and every year he has to be fitted up for a new pair. This is a true story.  Really!

Sadly there really wasn’t time to stand in the line of people and shuffle slowly to the chapel containing the relics and I couldn’t really think of anything to ask for anyway, except perhaps could Leicester City win the Premier League again this year, so choking on incense and elbowing our way past genuine pilgrims who wanted to discuss their ailments we made our way to the door and back out into the sunlit street.

Click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…