citinotes
Nobles and popolo
Although far from the big cities of western Europe, Greece has been holding an important geostrategic position at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. For centuries, many of its islands have served as stops along trade routes of major maritime powers, such as Venice, Genoa and England. Just like Syros in the Aegean, Corfu, an island of the Ionian Sea facing the Adriatic, grew a cosmopolitan outlook resulting from the centuries-old presence of foreign trade powers on its ground.
Miles away from the Cycladic white-and-blue architecture, so typical of Greece, a simple walk on the streets of Corfu city reminds us of how close the island lies to Italy. Its Pompeii-reds and ochre-walled buildings, up to five-floors high, with their dark-green shutters, are a strong city mark of the four-century-long Venetian rule on the island. The elegant Spianada, the city’s esplanade, lined with two beautiful arcades -a replica of rue de Rivoli- takes us back to when Napoleon brought an air of Paris to Corfu. The esplanade’s cricket field reminds us of the brief period the island served as a protectorate of the United Kingdom in the middle of the 19th century.
And if a city street is named after Albert Cohen, it’s not just because Corfiots are well-read. The eminent Jewish-Swiss novelist of Belle du Seigneur was born in Corfu, in a neighborhood still called Hebrew (Ovraiki) in homage to its unfading community. The island is as cosmopolitan on its streets as it is in its kitchens: the Corfiot cuisine is one of the most colorful melting pots to be found in Greece, with recipes coming from as far as France and Russia, but also as close as Venice and Malta.
Despite the absence of feudalism in Greece, Corfu had its own nobility imported from Venice. Generations of nobles, Signori and Signore were raised in elegant mansions, riding horse-drawn carriages, enjoying operas from their personal lodges at the Theater of San Giacomo. What if Napoleon’s troops burned the Libro d’Oro, Corfu’s index of noble families -another loan from Venice- and ripped the coats of arms off the house doors? A long echo of nobility still flows in the Corfiot air: you can hear it in the titles “Sior” (Sir) and “Siora” (Lady) that some people are still been addressed; you can read it on the surviving slabs featuring Venice’s Lion of Saint Marc; and you can surely feel it in the fadeless charm of Monrepos royal mansion, birthplace of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
The first of our selected travel notes retrace the different rulers who marked the culture of the island throughout the centuries. His author, Joseph Reinach, a 19th-century French journalist with a strong liking for history, wrote his impressions of Corfu in 1879. A few years earlier, in 1858, Albert Mousson, a botanologist from Switzerland also visited Corfu. With the eye of a scientist, Mousson did an inside-out “scan” of the different populations who lived in Corfu, providing us with vivid descriptions of both attitudes and outfits.
Among many writers who have observed the influence of Italy in the Corfiot spirit was the multi-awarded French novelist and playwright Michel Déon. With an extensive bibliography counting over 40 publications, he was given the prestigious ticket to the Académie Française in 1978. After having spent years living and writing about Greece, Italy and Portugal -among other countries- Déon eventually became an expert in Mediterranean customs and cultures.
Later on, we find another two connoisseurs of the Corfiot state of mind: Pavlos Paleologos and Gerasimos Chitiris. Born in a suburb of Constantinople (nowadays Istanbul), Paleologos was a Greek writer and columnist. In one of his most vivid descriptions, he resumes Corfu’s 19th century into a Sunday walk along the Spianiada, the island’s majestic esplanade. Built with marble stone, Spianada was used as the perfect backdrop for the nobility to show off their fancy garments, tall hats and lace parasols. Those Sunday walks were their heyday; and it would be remembered with great nostalgia when their power started to decline, slowly but surely, at the turn of the 20th century.
Gerasimos Chitiris was one of the most important researchers of the Corfiot history in Greece. He wrote a dictionary of the Italian-influenced Corfiot dialect and a book that gathered local customs and traditions; retraced the history of the Republic of the Ionian islands; wrote about the opera performances at the city’s Theater of San Giacomo. From the early 1970s to the 1980s, his weekly column revived moments of the Corfiots’ daily routines: in the extract below, we follow Sior Giorgis in a nostalgic reminiscence of his long-gone prestigious life as a noble.
Young female statues, “Kores”, adorning the Achilleion Palace in Corfu, Greece.
Citinotes
chapter 1
Melting pot
Each ruler, another culture.
All nations of the world have reigned here: first Corinth, then Macedonia, Syracuse, Rome, Byzantium, Epirus, Sicily, the Turks, Venice, France after Campo-Formio, Russia after Amiens, and then France, for the second time, after Tilsitt, England after Waterloo, and today Greece. […]
The esplanade is a work of the French, of General Donzelot. The English built a Greek temple in memory of Sir Thomas Maitland and an obelisk to honor Sir Howard Douglas. Nothing survived from the (era of the) Turks. Here and there, one can catch sight of the old lion of Saint-Marc still trying to stretch his wings; or, the motto of the Revolution that reminds of the passing to Corfu half-erased by the rains.
Joseph Reinach, Voyage en Orient, Charpentier, 1879.
The tribes
I think that nowhere else will you be able to find a greater variety of man-made figures and costumes together.
Porters panting; barefoot fishermen; sailors from every nationality -some with clothes stained by everyday work, others with their clean Sunday shirt on; Jews seeking profit; Corfiots with dark coats and blue, baggy shorts; agile Greeks with ornate waistcoats noticed by their Foustanelles (note: traditional pleated skirt-like garment); handsome Arvanites (notes: a community from Albania) with wool capes thrown over their shoulders; even people from Montenegro, armed to the teeth next to cautious Turks; all of them mixed together. Among them, numerous priests move around like spectators, from the self-centered seminary students to the proud high priest with his long cassock and a tall cape; and on the other side, one sees the blond carefree faces of the English soldiers walking in pairs…
Albert Mousson, Korfu und Cefalonien, Druck und Verlag von Fr. Schulthess, 1859.
Half-way between Italy and Greece
Brindisi is a Greek city and Corfu an Italian island. When you travel from one to the other, you tend to believe that geographers made some sort of a mistake…
…these eternally careless (geographers) who delineate borders with a line drawing, dividing the world and sowing the seeds of war.
After all, the Adriatic is not quite a border, but rather a vehicle: a kind of a rolling carpet, badly stretched, with folds and hollowed spots that carry ships and islands detached from the land; large spots of yellow mud, trees, and human bodies…all the things that Europe devoured and threw up from Venice to Trieste, from Fiume and along the Dalmatian coast.
The remnants of a monstrous, indigestible meal descend to the Mediterranean that scatters them, throws them into its deepest pockets; but when sometimes it gets angry, it pushes them away with fury, stirring in them its own shipwrecks that wash up on the coast of the Ionian islands.
Michel Déon, Le rendez-vous de Patmos, La Table Ronde, 1971.
Stone plaque of the Lion of Saint Marc, emblem of the Venetian maritime republic. The plaque is a remnant ornating the Royal Gate of the New Fortress built by the Venetians in the 16th century and completed by French and British colonial rulers.
Sir Frederick Adam, Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands between 1824 and 1832. His statue, crafted by Corfiot artist Pavlos Prosalentis, ornates the Palace of St. Michael and St. George which served as residence for the British High Commissionners.
A 17th-century Greek church of a style clearly influenced by the Italian Baroque.
A stroll along the Promenade of Garitsa, overviewing the Old Fortress from afar, in a photograph taken in 1900.
chapter 2
The Sunday walk of a noble
The distance between the nobility and the popolo -the common people- was chaotic. […] The nobles took their titles for the services they rendered to the Venetian state. The Libro d’Oro was the official index of the nobles. On the esplanade plaque (note: the so-called Spianada) their names were engraved. The coats of arms on their house doors attested to the aristocracy of the tenants.
The crowd was far away. The bourgeoisie at a certain distance. Even public walks had their points of separation. The plebs, so called popolari, walked in the middle of the Spianada. The aristocrats were walking by the Volta: a picturesque line of arches below the building complex that frames one side of the Spianada.
This was the work of the French when they were in possession of the island: a miniature of rue de Rivoli in Paris; with arches and large lanterns hanging from each arch.
The Volta witnessed all the nobles passing through: wearing cardigans, stiff collars, and Mirabeau hats that men would solemnly raise every now and then to exchange greetings or pay tribute to the Countess; she would take her walk holding, with one hand, the tail of her skirt, and, with the other, the golden handle of her walking stick.
[…] What I wouldn’t give for a Sunday morning walk, even in the middle of the Spianada, to enjoy the show of the nobility, walking up and down, taking bows, flirting, kissing the fingertips of the ladies…
[…] The distinctions are long gone. The flames of the (French) Revolution cremated the Libro d’Oro; erased the nobles’ names from the esplanade’s plaque, removed the heraldries from the mansions. […]
But, why do they need all that today, if they are deprived of the riches of their ancestors? (At the time) there was no nobleman who would start his meal if his servant did not announce the big moment with a cannon firing at the yard of his mansion. Dinner and cannons.
If I am not mistaken, his descendant is now a secretary at the tax office…His poor means no longer allow him to have a cannonball announcing his Lilliputian meals. […] Today, the Countess will forgive your poverty. If your financial situation is not prosperous, she may not even deny giving her daughter to you…a sine nobilitas, a man “without-title”, a descendant of an ox trader coming from a mountain village. […] Today, the distance between classes survives only in the subconscious of the common people who, due to their respect for tradition and heredity, still reserve a special place for their lordships.
Pavlos Paleologos, Corfu, my love, Saliveros, 1958.
Παύλος Παλαιολόγος, Αγάπη μου Κέρκυρα, Σαλίβερος, 1958.
chapter 3
Once a noble, always a noble
Every morning Sior Georgis walked down from the Vianelou alley to the Cofineta and entered the alley of the Saint (note: refers to Saint Spyridon, the island’s patron saint) to worship his grace. Back then, the alley was like a neighborhood yard: behind every door there was a worker or a craftsman and all of them were connected to the city and the everyday life with a bond of friendship.
Sior Georgis always stopped in front of every door to say good morning to everyone. […] Every day, the shoemaker would invite him in: “Sior Georgis, on your way back, get yourself a cup of coffee and come over…” […] “With pleasure”, Sior Giorgis responded.
Indeed, he was happily accepting (the invitation), because that would give him the opportunity to leave his dark basement apartment, a former coal warehouse. “I put nothing in my mouth, before I worship his grace”. His religious respect was as real and big as his deprivation. Tall and underweight, he was floating in a greasy suit which was obviously not his size. A stiff collar over a weary shirt and a tie that was almost the same age as the hat. But, everyone was calling him “Sior” with the unshakable belief of a noble ancestry.
His return (from the church) marked the beginning of the “show”. They all gathered in a good-natured mood to tease Sior Giorgis.
– “I don’t get it.” said the carpenter. “Why is he called Sior Georgis, when I am simply called Georgis?”
– But Sior Georgis descends from Counts!
– So much for his barony!
– “The rings may have fallen, but the fingers remain” said Sior Georgis calmly, with his thin voice.
– Didn’t you know that Sior Georgis was a Count? His father even had a horse-drawn carriage of his own and a stable at Saint Caterini. […]
– “And with our own box seats at the theater! Every second evening we were going to the opera! And what an opera that was!” added Sior Georgis with nostalgia. “What fantastic Lucias, Figaros, Rusticanas, Rigolettos …”
– […] Not just a Count, but a Count with a heraldry.
– […] And what if he had that…how did you call it? Herady?
– “A heraldry…” Sior Georgis patiently explained, “…of a wild goat whose horns were holding the globe.”
– […] The whole world standing over horns??? Oh, that’s why there are so many of them!” (note: in the Greek slang language, people who have been cheated on by their partners can be ironically described as “horned”).
The yard burst into laughter. Every day the carpenter would invent another joke to tease Sior Georgis. But Sior Georgis was like a lamb: a Corfiot sparrow that was happy to live for today and let God take care of tomorrow. […] He would smoke the cigarettes he was offered laying back with his legs crossed, and start singing arias…“la donna è mobile….!”, keeping the rhythm with his hand. In the reminiscence of a youth long gone, he was the happiest man in all Corfu.
Gerasimos Chitiris, Notes of a Corfiot, Gavriilidis, 2010.
Γεράσιμος Χυτήρης, Σημειώσεις ενός Κερκυραίου, Γαβριηλίδης, 2010.
Corfu for nobles
The most elegant spots to discover Corfu's noble glory
