Little is known about Corfu’s first inhabitants. Prehistoric traces found at Gardíki in the southwest date back to the Middle Palaeolithic Era (c.40,000 BC), when the island was probably joined to the Greek mainland. Unlike on other Ionian islands, however, no traces of Mycenaean settlements have ever surfaced on Corfu, which may instead have been held by the Phoenicians during the late Bronze Age (1500 BC to 1150 BC).
Corfu’s acknowledged history begins in 734 BC, when the Corinthians established a colony called Korkyra, south of today’s Kérkyra Town, in an area known as Paleópolis (Old City). Archaeological digs (still in progress) have turned up temples near Kardáki Spring and Mon Repos, but the ancient city was otherwise destroyed by barbarian raiders and its stone masonry subsequently used to build medieval Kérkyra Town. The famous 6th-century BC Gorgon pediment from the Temple of Artemis, now in the Archaeological Museum, is the most important surviving artefact of classical Korkyra.
Prospering from trade with southern Italy, Korkyra grew into a strong maritime power. In 665 BC, Korkyra defeated Corinth in what the historian Thucydides described as the first naval battle in Greek history, thus gaining independence and subsequently founding colonies of her own. Corfu’s pact with Athens against Corinth and Sparta in 433 BC proved to be, according to Thucydides, the final straw that set off the Peloponnesian War and hastened the end of classical Greece.
From then on, Corfu suffered attack, pillage and often highly destructive occupation. Situated barely a nautical mile from the Epirot mainland at its nearest point, Corfu’s safe harbours, fertile soil and strategic position between the Adriatic and Ionian seas made it a prize worth contesting by any power aiming to control the region.
According to Homer’s Odyssey, the hero Ulysses (‘Odysseus’ in Greek) was shipwrecked during his 10-year voyage home from the Trojan War. He was washed ashore on the island of Skheria – the ancient name of Corfu – that was inhabited by the Phaeacians, and was found by Princess Nausikaa and her handmaidens when they came to wash clothes at a nearby stream. She persuaded her father, King Alkinoös, to provide a boat to return him to his native Ithaca, but this assistance angered Poseidon (the god of the sea), who turned the ship to stone in revenge for Odysseus’ killing of the Cyclops, a son of Poseidon.
Three Corfu sites claim to be the Homeric place where Ulysses’ boat was petrified. All have the requisite double harbour approached by a narrow causeway, as well as an offshore rock that (with a bit of imagination) resembles a petrified ship. These are Mouse Island, off Kanóni; Kolóvri, south of Paleokastrítsa; and Krávia (meaning ‘ship’), northwest of Cape Arílla. The beach where Ulysses was washed ashore is touted as the west coast’s Érmones, largely on account of its small stream.
Roman Conquest, Barbarian Raids
Around 229 BC a Roman fleet arrived and seized the island from the Illyrians, making Corfu the Roman republic’s earliest Adriatic conquest. For the next five and a half centuries, Corfu prospered as a Roman naval base. En route to and from battles Nero, Tiberius, Cato, Cicero, Caesar, Octavian and Mark Antony (with Cleopatra) were among the Roman notables who visited Corfu. During the 1st century AD two saints – Iason (Jason) and Sosipatros (Sosipater) – brought Christianity to the island. Certain structures at Paleópolis are among the few remnants from Corfu’s Roman period.
When the Roman Empire split in the 4th century AD, its eastern half, Byzantium, took administrative control of Corfu but could provide little security. Rampaging Vandals raided the island in AD 445, while in AD 562 a horde of Ostrogoths badly damaged Corfu’s ancient capital. which, however, was only slowly abandoned from the 7th century onwards.
Partway through the 10th century, the Corfiots moved their capital 2km (1 mile) north and built their first fortress on the rocky bluff commanding the town’s eastern sea approach. The Old Fort still stands today on this site. Elsewhere, islanders abandoned coastal settlements and retreated inland to establish protected hillside villages.
Normans and Sicilians
Then appeared a formidable new enemy. Several times between 1080 and 1185, Norman forces crossed the sea from Sicily and Italy to attack Corfu and nearby outposts of the enfeebled Byzantine Empire. The rulers in Constantinople asked for help, the Venetians responded and thereafter took an active interest in the destiny of both Corfu and the empire as a whole.
When Doge Enrico Dandolo and his Fourth Crusade seized Constantinople in 1204, the spoils claimed by Venice included western Greece, parts of the Peloponnese and the Ionian islands. However, Venice was unable to extend immediate control over all its new possessions and Corfu aligned itself with the Greek Despotate of Epirus, which then held parts of what are today Albania and western Greece. In 1214 Mikhaïl Angelos Komnenos II, head of the despotate, formally acquired the island, strengthening existing fortresses at Angelókastro and Gardíki.
However, the Normans still had designs on Corfu. In 1259, the island was presented to King Manfred, the Hohenstaufen king of Sicily, as Mikhaïl’s daughter Helena’s dowry. Eight years later, the new king of Sicily and Naples, Charles d’Anjou, became the overlord of Corfu, where his family – the Angevins – subsequently ruled for over a century. During this time the traditional Eastern Orthodoxy of the island was almost extinguished by the new official religion of Roman Catholicism.
Corfu’s Old Fort
Kevin Cummins/Apa Publications
Venetian Rule
As Angevin power diminished, Corfu’s fledgling assembly of 24 barons, mindful of the danger presented by marauding corsairs, invited Venice to send in a protective military force. The Venetians landed on 20 May 1386, beginning an uninterrupted occupation that lasted for over four centuries. In the following year, Corfu officially became part of the Stato da Màr, the Venetian maritime empire. Kérkyra Town prospered once again as a key port for galleys plying far-flung commercial routes, and the Venetians turned the Byzantine fort in Kérkyra Town into an impregnable bastion.
In 1463, having swept across mainland Greece, the Ottoman Turks declared war on Venice. During the following years they mounted many assaults on the Ionian Islands, and in 1537 they turned on Corfu. Intent on seizing Kérkyra Town, the Ottoman fleet, led by pirate-admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa landed cannon and 25,000 troops north of the capital at Gouviá. The fortress withstood a bitter attack, but the rest of the island was looted and the vengeful Turks carried off some 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners – nearly half the population – into slavery.
Patron saint
It is said that at the height of the Ottoman siege of August 1716, St Spyridon appeared amidst a raging storm with a lighted torch and scared the invaders away. August 11 is now one of the days that commemorate Corfu’s patron saint.
Following this great siege, the Venetians dug the Contrafossa, a canal separating the Old Fort from the town. They also erected a ‘New Fortress’ (so called even today) to guard the city’s northwestern approach.
Corfu’s finest military hour was to come in July 1716, once more against the Turks and once more at great cost. After losing both Athens and the Peloponnese to the Venetians late in the 17th century, the Ottomans successfully counterattacked, retaking the Peloponnese and Lefkáda before sending over 30,000 troops to besiege Corfu. Venice hired foreign regiments under the German mercenary commander Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg to defend the island. For five bloody weeks just 8,000 defenders held Kérkyra Town while the Turks, with their overwhelmingly superior forces, ravaged the rest of the island. They appeared poised to capture the capital when they suddenly called off their assault and fled, after severe casualties occasioned by a ferocious storm in August. The Ottomans never returned, and Corfu was never subjugated by the Ottomans.
Throughout its long occupation, Venice kept Corfu under a strict feudal regime, a colony valued as an important naval base, trading depot and tariff-collection station. A civil-military governor and senior bureaucrats sent from Venice ran the island. Much like Venice’s Libro d’Oro, a Golden Book listing the Corfiot nobility contained 277 families at the time that Corfu passed from Venetian hands to Napoleonic forces.
However, ordinary islanders were heavily taxed and denied public education, and Greek Orthodoxy was eclipsed by Roman Catholicism. Italian replaced Greek as the official language, even though the peasantry couldn’t understand it and had no way of learning it. Many laboured as serfs in the Venetian aristocrats’ villas, some of which still dot the countryside.
More happily, Venice was responsible for nearly all the olive trees that grace Corfu’s landscape. Olive production transformed the island’s economy for good. Apart from the olive trees, the most visible legacies of Venetian rule are the older districts of Kérkyra Town: with its narrow streets and tall buildings, it is the most European city in Greece.
Napoleon’s Dream Island
In 1797 the doges’ republic and its possessions fell to Napoleon through the Treaty of Campo Formio, thus ending 411 years of Venetian occupation. For reasons that remain obscure, Napoleon was rather obsessed with Corfu. ‘The greatest misfortune which could befall me is the loss of Corfu,’ he wrote rather melodramatically to his foreign minister, Talleyrand, and quickly sent a force to occupy Corfu and the other Ionian Islands.
Napoleonic forces replaced Venice’s autocratic rule with new democratic representation, burned Corfu’s Golden Book, introduced public education and made Greek the official language. Nevertheless, they still managed to antagonise the island’s inhabitants by continuing to suppress the Orthodox Church. Within two years the French were driven out of the island by a joint Russo-Turkish force that reinstated Greek Orthodoxy as the official religion under the puppet ‘Septinsular Republic’. However, in 1807 the French regained Corfu from the Russians by the Treaty of Tilsit. This time Napoleon garrisoned the citadels with 50,000 men along with 500 new cannon, making Corfu one of the most powerfully fortified points in the eastern Mediterranean.
The French also established the first Ionian Academy for the promotion of arts and sciences, imported Greece’s first printing presses, drew up a street plan for Corfu Town, built a miniature Rue de Rivoli (the Listón) and introduced the cultivation of potatoes and tomatoes, now mainstays of Corfiot cooking.
The First European
Corfu’s most famous son is Ioannis Kapodistrias (1776–1831). Born into an aristocratic family, he became Greece’s first president in 1827 and is hailed as the first statesman to envisage a unified Europe. From 1799 until 1807, Kapodistrias was instrumental in the administration of the Septinsular Republic under Russian tutelage. He then served until 1822 as a diplomat in the Russian court of Tsar Alexander I. On a mission to Switzerland in 1813, he orchestrated the Swiss Federation, which has remained in place to this day. In the ensuing years he began to develop ideas of a unified Europe in which no one member would become too powerful and in which the powers would collectively regulate the whole. In this vision he was a man ahead of his time. Sadly, his political ideals also brought him parochial enemies, and he was assassinated on the Greek mainland in 1831 by two clan chieftains. In 1994 his home island fittingly hosted a summit meeting of the very union of which he had dreamed.
The British Move In
After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the British took Corfu in 1814 by the terms of the Treaty of Vienna, which turned the seven Ionian Islands into a notional state under British ‘protection’. Corfu became the capital and Sir Thomas Maitland was appointed the first Lord High Commissioner.
Palace of St Michael and St George
Fotolia
The British occupation of Corfu lasted for just 50 years, and brought certain benefits. Under Maitland, a road network was built. His successor, Frederick Adam, built the road to Paleokastrítsa and brought a permanent water-supply system to Kérkyra Town. While some changes were mere personal caprice on the part of the ten British high commissioners, they also introduced hospitals, a model prison, a decent judiciary, and religious freedom, ensuring the primacy of the Orthodox Church. The slightly eccentric Frederic North, 5th Earl of Guilford – a philhellene who went about in Classical Greek dress and actually converted to Orthodox Christianity – established modern Greece’s first university, the second Ionian Academy, in Kérkyra Town in 1824. He bequeathed to it his library of 25,000 books and helped to make Corfu the country’s chief literary and intellectual centre of its day.
The British legacy
The British left behind a number of stately buildings and monuments as well as cricket, ginger beer and Christmas chutney – island favourites even today.
The constitution set in place by Maitland was another matter. Though maintaining a façade of parliamentary government with a Corfiot senate and assembly, the high commissioner retained all effective power. Serious unrest first occurred in the 1820s, when Maitland stopped the Corfiots from giving assistance to Greek mainlanders engaged in the war of independence against Turkey. This engendered bitterness among the islanders, who dubbed Maitland ‘the abortion’ for his rudeness, and aversion to bathing.
As a strong movement for unification with the mainland arose after Greece emerged as a state in 1830, the British introduced token constitutional reforms, but the high commissioner’s power remained intact. However, agitation for union – énosis – continued to grow.
Greek at Last
When Prince William of Denmark was crowned King George I in Athens in 1864, Corfu and the six other Ionian Islands were ceded to Greece as a condition of George’s accession to the throne. The islands were declared ‘perpetually neutral’, and, before hauling down the Union Jack, the British blew up the impressive fortifications they had added to Kérkyra Town. When they sailed off, the island’s assembly made known its gratitude to Queen Victoria for this unprecedented voluntary withdrawal by a great power from an overseas possession.
Peace settled on the island in its early years as a province of Greece. Aristocratic tourists converged here, including Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who liked it so much that she commissioned the grandiose Achilleion Palace.
Although royalist Greece was officially neutral during the first three years of World War I, Venezelist-republican Corfu effectively served as an Allied military and naval base. In early 1916 Corfu gave refuge to the exiled government of Serbia and its troops as they fled defeat at the hands of the Bulgarians and Austrians. Thousands died from wounds and disease, buried both on Vídos islet and at sea adjacent, but many more recovered at camps across the island, beginning a long-standing mutual love affair between Serbia and Corfu. On 31 August 1923 Mussolini ordered his fleet to bombard the island in reprisal for the murder of four high-ranking Italian officers on the Albanian-Greek border. Italian forces occupied Corfu for most of September until League of Nations mediations saw their withdrawal in exchange for a Greek apology and payment of reparations. The Italians returned as occupiers during World War II, from spring 1941 until Italy capitulated in September 1943.
When the Germans tried to succeed their defeated allies, the Italian troops (who had now switched sides) resisted on Corfu and throughout the Ionian islands. In the ensuing battles and bombardments, nearly a quarter of Kérkyra Town was destroyed, including the parliament house, academy and municipal theatre. After a year of occupation, during which the thriving Jewish community was deported to its death, German forces evacuated Corfu in October 1944. The British moved in, and peace reigned once more.
Corfu was largely unaffected by the Greek civil war between communist and royalist armies that raged on the mainland between 1947 and 1949, though in light of its rebellious republican past it was garrisoned by a special gendarmerie. Since then, tourism, real estate sales and agriculture – the three economic mainstays of the island – have brought unprecedented prosperity to much of Corfu, though it has been affected by the post-2008 global economic downturn and the 2010–11 Greek debt crisis. However, despite the country’s worsening political and financial situation, 2014 saw a record 23 percent rise in the number of foreign visitors with 22 million choosing to spend their holidays under Greece’s clear blue skies.