It is said that the island took its name from the Citadel, from the Greek korfous, meaning the ‘peaks’ of the fortress (although derivations have to be treated with some caution, since a well-liked Corfiot dish aristou is said to be simply a corruption of Irish stew).
For at least 800 years there has been a fortress on the huge haunch of rock, although only in a country so rich in its past as Greece would such a prominence be allowed to decay and crumble like an old cake in the way this Citadel has done. It has, however, some good features: cannons and mortars used as gateposts and even lamp standards, and an exquisite canal that cuts it away from the main town. The traveller John Locke noted in the sixteenth century that it had just been ‘trenched about by the sea’ and this trench has, fortunately, been preserved rather better than the fortress it was made to protect.
From the bridge high above the canal I looked down on its clever sanctuary, small boats moored side by side, and nose to stern, to protect them from winter’s marauding storms. A careful old fisherman was baiting some lines down below me, sitting in his sharp boat, throwing an occasional tidbit to any one of a group of five cats who sat in an expectant half circle. On the other side of the bridge five men were gossiping, two of them sitting in the stern of a boat, smoking, the puffs of their pipes rising like signals. When I peered over two hours later they were still there.
The condition of the interior of the Citadel makes you wonder if it is safe to walk about. Crumbling walls, collapsed wells, old gunpowder chambers grinning like openings in a bad set of teeth, weeds climbing towers; and the saddest of sights, a once fine clock, mottled and scarred, its faded golden hands crippled and stuck at three minutes past three.
If one wants to reach the top of this mouldy pile you creep up through a lightless, dripping tunnel, over broken and slippery steps, and out through a small aperture – to a thrilling viewpoint, overlooking sky and sea, islands and the piled and coloured buildings of Corfu Town.
It was November (I was the final guest to leave the hotel before it closed for the winter) and there was rain and dazzling thunderstorms that lit the surprised faces of the mountains and danced on the sea. But there were serene days, also, when the light was dulcet, when an hour in a concealed bay, sitting on rocks, looking into the depths of the water, was an hour sweetly spent.
So, equally, was an hour idling under the fine, lanterned arches of the Liston, doing nothing better than drinking ouzo, watching the passing people and the dogs sitting like fielders between the fall of wickets on the famous cricket pitch. Cricket arrived in Corfu, naturally, with the British but not because of the influence, as some would have it, of Lord Byron. It was the British Army who laid out the cricket field on the Esplanade. It afforded an open area, a field of fire for guns pointing seawards, and recreation for officer batsmen and bowlers. The private soldier was not so accommodated. ‘On Sundays,’ wrote Private Wheeler, a soldier whose letters have been collected and published, ‘after service the whole garrison march to the Esplanade where the Major General amuses himself for two or three hours in putting them through a field day.’
Life is less regimented now. Royal Navy teams kept the cricket alive after the British garrison left, then the Corfiots learned the game and today there are two teams who play a version of the English summer game against each other and against scratch teams of visitors.
It was facing the cricket field, on one of the warm nights, that I sat eating my dinner when Spiro, the waiter, sidled up and whispered carefully, ‘Sir, a stitch in time saves nine.’
Unable to find anything about my person which needed urgent repairs, I awaited his return to question him. He struck first. This time he said, ‘It’s a long road that has no turning.’ He looked at me anxiously. Did I think that was true? Yes, I thought it was. Later he was back with a sibilant, ‘Every cloud has a silver lining,’ and a splendid amalgam, ‘Look after the pennies and tomorrow will look after itself.’
These wise saws, it appeared, he was garnering from a book of English proverbs, arming himself for brighter and better conversation with the tourists he would be serving the following summer.
As I left I thought I would, in cricket parlance, bowl a bouncer at him. I confided, ‘When in doubt, do the right thing.’
I was immediately sorry. Bafflement clutched at his face, he scratched his head. But then he smiled surely and leaned close enough to whisper triumphantly, ‘But a stitch in time saves nine.’
The Corfiot is cheerful and friendly, provided you have time to talk. One night all the taxis in the town had apparently gone home to bed and I was given a lift by a telephone engineer from Athens who was living on the island. ‘Never, never, never, will you be able to understand how the people here think,’ he told me sadly. ‘They are strange indeed. I know, I am married to one.’
During the summer the common rural scene is of women hoeing the fields, digging the ditches, carrying loads and driving goats and donkeys, while the menfolk seem to spend an inordinate amount of time sitting and talking in the tavernas. In the south of the island, so I heard, the women held a protest meeting about their hard lot and demanded concessions from their menfolk. The only condition they could wring was that, in future, the wife would not be expected to carry the donkey’s load so that her husband could ride on the donkey – for a trial period only.
Out of the town the ancient life settles like a cloak over the countryside. Roads narrow and curve into mountain villages where old men sit in chairs in the street (their womenfolk being well occupied in the fields) where the village well and the café television set are the centres of communal activity. One wonders what such people, with their rough floors, their basic life, make of some of today’s television programmes.
Costas, the man who drove me out into the northern hills, told me that on his television set he can get programmes from Yugoslavia, Albania and Italy, but not from mainland Greece. The reception is not good enough. Yet the island is in a fluke position for receiving radio broadcasts. They flow loud and clear from the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Russian bloc countries and from Africa. A man called Michael Gurdus, who listens eighteen hours a day, broke the news of the Entebbe raid to the Western world, and the failure of President Carter’s attempt to rescue the Iran hostages.
Albania is Corfu’s close neighbour. The channel between the two is only just over a mile wide in the northeast of the island. Looking out from the delightful, warm, busy village of Kouloura across the water, it lies hard, mountainous and deserted, brooding like an ugly sister.
Up through the mountain passes I went, a country bald with rocks, but with slender cypress trees standing like the look-outs of an army. On one lonely stretch of road was a lorry playing pop music from a loudspeaker. ‘I’ve got what you want,’ recommended the singer, appropriately since the wonderfully ornate gipsy woman on the tailboard was selling plastic pails and bowls to village housewives.
A priest trudged down the sloping road with a suitcase, ruminating into his beard as he walked, thinking possibly of God, or of the next incline. The faces of the people seemed as lined as the land. Their olive groves cling to abyss and crag and their vegetables are grown on terraces barely wider than balconies. The difficulties of life show plainly.
Over the mountains we came to Paleocastrizza, a creamy church with shining bells, perched poetically above a dragon coast of deep-cut rocks and bays. The sea was ruffled and blue, there were shady trees in the walled garden of the church and relays of women carried earth for another flowerbed in baskets and tins upon their heads. Life is peaceful but hard.
It is said that Ulysses was wrecked on this rugged north-westerly coast of Corfu, and certainly in the museum in the town there is an intriguing Gorgon carved in stone now 2,500 years old. But, oddly perhaps, the island is without the extravagance of archaeological remains that litter most of mainland Greece.
The history of Corfu was much influenced by the French, the British and particularly Venetians. (Due to a mistake of the
League of Nations Corfu was also put, for two days, under the control of Japan. I suppose it does sound oriental.) Just along the coast from Corfu Town at Gouvis, down some muddy roads that lead to the seashore, and in splendid neglect, is a Venetian arsenal, a wonderful geometry of stone arches, now roofless, criss-crossing each other and casting multiple shadows in the sunlight. Here the ships of the Levant Squadron were pulled from the water and repaired. The place has haphazard wire fencing around it now (full of holes so it is easy to gain entrance) and weeds grow plentifully among the foundations, but it is not difficult to imagine the industry of three centuries ago, with the shipwrights working and the vessels of the Serene Republic lying offshore in the lonian sunshine.
The French are remembered by the Liston, perhaps as odd a transference of culture, bringing the rue de Rivoli from Paris, as the British establishing a cricket ground immediately alongside it. History can also be found in the British Cemetery, a cool and secluded place, cared for by a custodian called Georges, a Greek who lives at the gate.
Here, below the trees, is the grave of The Honourable Charles Monckton, Captain in Her Britannic Majesty’s 38th Regiment of Connaught Rangers, who died at the hand of an assassin on 9 August 1857, aged twenty-six years. Here also lies Lieutenant Colonel William Jardner Freer who fought in all the major battles of the Peninsular. War, losing an arm at Badajos, and dying in Corfu at the age of forty-five. Private John Connors of the Buffs is buried a few paces away – he won the Victoria Cross.
More recent history was marked by the Corfiots while I was on their island. October 28 is Ohi Day (literally ‘No’ day) marking the moment in 1940 when the Greeks refused to bow to the demands of the bully Mussolini. All over the nation parades were held and in Corfu the streets were crowded in the pale sunshine with people watching a happy and thankfully nondescript parade made up of a few soldiers but mostly of bands and out-of-step school children. It was an ebullient affair. Three times I was in danger of having an eye poked out by ecstatic parents pointing out their offspring to each other as they jolted by. The bands kept appearing from mystifying directions – twice joining the parade after bursting through the thick crowd from the rear.
Mussolini, like Napoleon, had a fascination for Corfu, although neither ever visited the island. In 1923, the Italian dictator sent a warship to bombard the town in retaliation for the assassination of a Fascist envoy to a boundary conference in Albania. He would have occupied the island if it had not been for British influence.
If history can be regarded as entertainment, and why not, then Corfu’s contribution is in the Achilleion, the astonishing mansion and garden built by the sad Empress Elizabeth of Austria. She had stayed on the island in 1861, for once out of sight of her adulterous husband Franz Josef and his witch of a mother. Imagining herself to have found, at last, happiness, she commissioned the house to be built and thirty years later it was complete. But she spent little time there before her death at the hand of an assassin in 1898.
The house is a glaring mixture of styles and parodies of styles, replete with cupids, angels and nymphs (sucking their fingers), terraces, stairs, carvings and cornices, in goodness knows how many varieties. The whole is said to represent Achilles. Henry Moore wrote of it, ‘The Palace at Achilleion stands as an abomination in the face of nature and all things lovely.’
Abomination or not, Corfiots rejoice in sending their visitors to view the charming travesty. I went, additionally, to see one of its newer attractions – it houses the Corfu Casino. Roulette being my speciality I played for a couple of hours and, as is my custom, came out with more than I entered.
What riveted me in the Casino was that at each croupier’s hand, on each of the fifteen or so tables, and amid all the apparent sophistication, the clicking quiet, the evening dresses, the stuffed white shirts and the diamonds, was a large red, plastic battery-operated flashlamp. The management, with a few million drachmas on the tables, it seemed trusted neither the electricity supply nor the customers. A switch, to paraphrase Spiro the waiter, in time saves a lot more than nine.
CORFU situated latitude 38°3’N and longitude 20°5’E; area 231 sq. m (600 sq. km); population approx. 106,000; Greece
Madeira
The Ocean Garden
I do not know a spot on the globe which so astonishes and delights upon first arrival.
CAPTAIN MARRYAT
In the lofty centre of the Atlantic island of Madeira is a village called Curral das Freiras lying in the deep cup of a dead volcano. Until recent times there was no road to it and there were some villagers who never went to the outside, not even to Funchal, the island town. They were born, lived and died within the rim of the crater, their world bounded by soaring rocks and a single circle of sky. To leave would have been too difficult; it was too far to walk.
The volcano and the peaks that buttress it collect clouds. When Zarco, the Portuguese adventurer – sent by Henry the Navigator in the fifteenth century to explore the ocean beyond the horizon – first saw Madeira he thought it was a cloud. He watched from the small isle of Porto Santo, twenty-eight miles away, and wondered why the cloud was always there but did not venture further for a long time. In his heart he thought it might be the place where God brooded.
When he and his sailors finally voyaged the last few miles, past the barren and haunting islands they called the Desertas, they discovered that the cloud was adorning a mountain range rising from the ocean. It was covered with great trees – the Portuguese word for ‘wood’ is madeira – and Zarco charged one of his lieutenants with burning an area clear for the establishment of a settlement. The man, whose name and fate are not recorded, went too enthusiastically about the razing. He set the entire island ablaze. It burned for seven years.
Today the approach to the island by plane is slightly forbidding. The corrugated Atlantic is abruptly broken by a mountain bearded with cloud, its greyness casting a shadow over the land and the sea. The off-islands lie like patrol boats screening a battleship. Attached to the edge of the landmass, like some afterthought, is the airport. It was 1964 before the islanders could contrive a piece of ground flat enough to take a runway. Before that Madeira was reached only by sea and by flying boat. The runway is very short. Passengers blink with apprehension. The pilot doesn’t sound too happy. ‘If you have a nervous disposition,’ he mentions, ‘please pull down the window blinds.’
He has a final look at the approach then puts the Boeing 737 down (‘made for little places like this,’ he confides to cheer us), with a bump like an elevator, a few feet from the start of the runway. ‘It’s better than having to pull up sharply at the other end,’ he chats. We have ample room. We slow and everybody breathes and smiles again and says it was nothing really. Now the plane turns and we see the name of the island, Madeira, laid out in flowers.
Years ago there used to be a character in a decrepit peaked cap who stood on the quay at Funchal; he was called, he said, Manuel P. Texas. I met him when I came ashore from a ship bound for Rio and he took me on a tour of which I remember nothing. All that I do remember are his stories – told in an outrageous James Cagney accent – of how he had been on a sailing-ship wrecked off Madeira, his epic struggle ashore and how he had remained on the island ever since. He had tales of battles and storms and fruity love affairs – some of them possibly true.
A quarter of a century later I went to Funchal harbour with the thought that he might still be there but he wasn’t. What’s more, no one remembered him. There were guides named Manuel but none called P. Texas.
Since that first journey I have visited the island three times, twice only as a stopping place between other ports of the world (Madeira’s traditional role) and I do not remember going beyond the streets of Funchal, an old but very much lived-in place full of clatter and fumes. A doctor I went to see on the last occasion (I developed a spectacularly bleeding nose) described it as the most polluted place in the Atlantic Ocean.
Despite the almost total absence of roads (even into the
1970s they were limited) the motor car made an early appearance in Madeira. In 1909 an English observer commented on the first automobiles attempting to travel along Funchal’s cobbled and encrusted streets protested that they were ‘an outrage perpetrated on the most cherished traditions of the city . . . mushroom things . . . freaks that fitted as ill as a silk hat on the head of a peasant.’ He happily concluded that it was a passing fad and that ‘the honour of the town is perfectly safe in the lines of its pavement.’
Some hope. Today Funchal is one of the most noisome and congested places I have ever seen. The tortuous jams were not helped, but undoubtedly enlivened, by the fact that the municipal authority was systematically dynamiting the roads in the most crowded parts of the town during the busiest times of the day. Funchal is built on volcanic rock, and each yard had to be blown up. So a policeman halted the traffic, the charge was exploded and when the dust and rubble had subsided, the drivers were waved on.
Yellow buildings with their old courtyards stand with some remaining dignity amid the twentieth-century mayhem but it is no surprise that the fifteenth-century cathedral looks inauspiciously like a railway station. The tight streets, the exotically grubby bars, the market and the port make up for the grit and the din. In the evening, when the cars are less and the dynamiting is still, hundreds of young people gather in the street that leads from the cathedral to the sea. They do not parade along tree-lined avenues as they do in the towns of the Iberian peninsula but simply stand and exchange gossip and jokes. When I first saw them congregate I thought it was a particularly quiet riot, a major accident or at least a film being shot. But they were just chatting.
My World of Islands Page 17
