Corfu

Corfu, Greece

The Venetian ramparts of Corfu's Old Fortress caught in late afternoon golden light beyond an olive tree on the Spianada square.

Corfu pairs a Venetian old town and fortress with Ionian coves, cliff walks and a kitchen that still tastes of Italy.

The place

Corfu, known in Greek as Kerkyra (Κέρκυρα), is an island in the Ionian Sea off western Greece. It stands furthest north among the main Ionian Islands. Only the Diapontian Islands, its small neighbours, lie farther out, and they are the westernmost land in Greece. Hydrographers draw the boundary between the Adriatic Sea, to the north, and the Ionian Sea, to the south, through this group. The regional unit of Corfu continues southward to the smaller island of Paxoi. Its capital is a city of the same name, on the eastern shore, looking across a short strait to the mainland. The population is 100,854. The land itself is long and gently curved. Northern slopes are the rougher walking country; the south holds Korission, an inland lake kept from the open sea by a strip of sand. Coves, longer bays and pale cliff capes alternate around the coast, so the island reads as both a town and a shoreline. Corfu's past is tangled with the wider Greek story from myth onward. Ancient Korkyra kept a serious navy. Thucydides placed its fleet beside those of Athens and Corinth, the three navies he counted as Greece's strongest in the fifth century BCE. He also described the Battle of Sybota, fought in these waters, as the greatest clash of city-state fleets up to then, and as a spark of the Peloponnesian War. Temple ruins and other remains of that city stand at Palaiopolis. Medieval castles, scattered over the island, recall later fights with pirates and Ottoman forces. Rule after that passed through Venice, France, the Septinsular Republic and the United States of the Ionian Islands before the island joined modern Greece.

Its story

Corfu enters the written record, as far as it survives, in the Late Bronze Age. Around 1300 BC a scribe using Linear B wrote ko-ro-ku-ra-i-jo, a Mycenaean Greek label for someone from Kerkyra. That label is the earliest name tied to the island, long before the classical city of Korkyra quarrelled with Corinth and Athens. Later writers tried to set the island inside Homer. Strabo treated Corcyra as Scheria, home of the Phaeacians in the Odyssey, and a number of scholars since have taken the same view. The poem itself gives no chart, and no object from the ground has closed the case. The theory remains a live story rather than a settled fact: a seafaring people on a green island at the edge of the Greek world. A different myth gives Corfu another name. In the Argonautica, Apollonius of Rhodes brings the Argonauts ashore here, and Jason and Medea are married in a place known as Medea's Cave. He calls the island Drepane, Greek for sickle. In one telling, the sickle is the one Cronus turned on his father Uranus, and the Phaeacians descend from the blood that spilled; in another, the buried blade belongs to Demeter. Apollonius may have been fitting a legend to a coastline. The island is long and hooked, and the name Drepane most likely started from that shape. Under the fortress and the tiled town, those older pictures remain: a Bronze Age word, an Odyssean island that cannot be proved, and a wedding cave.

What to see

Culture

Corfu's public culture has long faced both the Greek mainland and Italy. Under Venetian rule the island built a habit of opera and spoken theatre that outlasted the republic itself. The Nobile Teatro di San Giacomo di Corfù, in the town, is credited as modern Greece's earliest house for plays and opera, and it was where Spyridon Xyndas's The Parliamentary Candidate, a work with an entirely Greek libretto, reached the stage. People treated applause in Corfu as a serious compliment for an opera. Bands, choirs and parish celebrations still carry that musical thread through the town, especially on feast days. The museums sit in Corfu Town. The Archaeological Museum, opened in 1967, was raised to house the Gorgon pediment from the temple of Artemis at ancient Palaiopolis, uncovered in the early twentieth century. Galleries beside it keep later centuries too: Venetian pictures, Ionian portraits and libraries that mix Italian and Greek shelves. Between a band on a square and a pediment in a cool room, the island's culture is urban and accumulative, not a single costume or a single rite. In Corfu, cover shoulders and knees before entering a church, and wait at the edge rather than walking through a liturgy or a street procession.

What to wear

Corfu's older dress belongs to the Ionian, Venetian-influenced world rather than to the shepherd costume of the mainland mountains. In portraits and feast-day wear, women wore long skirts, embroidered jackets and lace or linen caps, and men wore breeches, waistcoats and caps, in wool or linen by season. Silk, lace and fine cotton came through the port, and embroidery on cuffs and hems marked a town family as surely as cut did. Those clothes now come out mainly for weddings and the folk groups that play on feast days, not for the street. Daily dress on Corfu is ordinary warm-weather clothing. In Corfu Town people wear light cotton and linen, sandals on the stone streets, and a smarter shirt or dress after work. Beach villages dress for sand and salt: swimwear, a shirt over the top, and shoes that survive hot paving and pebbles. Visitors should copy that split. Swimwear belongs on the beach, not in the old town or a church. Shoulders and knees need a cover before anyone goes inside a church. The Corfu Trail and the cliff paths need trainers or light boots rather than flip-flops. A hat and a layer for the evening breeze on the seafront are enough for most of a summer stay.

What to eat

Plan it

Best time. On Corfu, May, June, September and October are the easier months: ferries and tavernas are open, and the summer crush at the airport is either still ahead or already easing. July and August draw the most flights, and those are the departure queues to plan around.

How long. 3–4

Getting there. Fly into Corfu International Airport (CFU); summer schedules bring aircraft from across Europe, and the departures hall is slow at that time of year. Ferries link the island with Igoumenitsa and Patras on the Greek mainland, with Venice, Ancona, Bari and Brindisi in Italy, and with Saranda and Himara in Albania. Both the airport and the town ferry quay are a short local ride from the old town. Check the operator for current sailings.

Budget. mid

Tips

Etiquette

Nearby

Sources