About Corfu Island

Corfu — Kerkyra in Greek — is the northernmost of the Ionian islands and the second largest of them after Kefalonia. It lies close enough to Albania that the mainland opposite is plainly visible across a strait only a few kilometres wide, and that position, guarding the entrance to the Adriatic, is what made it worth fighting over for two thousand years. Four centuries of Venetian rule left it looking unlike anywhere else in Greece.

An island with a long reputation

Corfu has been written up as a paradise for a very long time. Homer's Scheria, where the shipwrecked Odysseus was taken in by the Phaeacians and sent home laden with gifts, has been identified with the island since antiquity. In the 1930s Lawrence and Gerald Durrell lived here, and Gerald's My Family and Other Animals turned a Corfiot childhood into the best-known account of the island in English.

Away from the resort strips the older island is still readable: cypress on the hill slopes, olive terraces planted under the Venetians, villages stacked along the ridges, and pebble coves the road never reached. A good many of those coves can only be entered from the water, which is why so many visitors explore Corfu by private gulet charter — the west coast in particular hides beaches with no landward approach at all, below cliffs that drop straight into deep water.

History

In myth the island is named for the nymph Korkyra, daughter of the river god Asopos and the nymph Metope, whom Poseidon carried off and settled here; their son Phaeax gave his name to the Phaeacians.

The historical record begins with settlers from Eretria, followed by a Corinthian colony founded around 730 BC. Ancient Korkyra grew into a serious naval power, and its quarrel with Corinth was one of the events that touched off the Peloponnesian War. Macedon and then Rome followed. Venice took the island in 1386 and held it until 1797, fortifying the town so heavily that repeated Ottoman sieges failed to break it — Corfu is the one part of Greece that never fell under Ottoman rule. The Old Fortress on its rocky promontory and the New Fortress above the harbour both date from that period.

A brief French occupation was followed by a British protectorate, established by the Treaty of Paris in November 1815. Britain ceded the Ionian Islands to Greece under the Treaty of London of March 1864, and the handover took place that May. Half a century of British administration left roads, a piped water supply, the Palace of St Michael and St George, and the cricket still played on the Spianada.

What to see

• Corfu Old Town, on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2007, is a dense grid of tall Venetian houses, arcaded streets and narrow alleys called kantounia, bracketed by the two fortresses. The church of Agios Spyridon holds the relics of the island's patron saint, carried through the streets in procession four times a year.
• The Achilleion at Gastouri, about ten kilometres south of the town, was built in 1890 for Elisabeth of Austria in the year after the death of her son Rudolf. Designed by Raffaele Caritto and themed throughout on Achilles, it later passed to Kaiser Wilhelm II.
• Kassiopi, on the north-east coast, is a fishing harbour ringed with tavernas below a ruined Byzantine castle. It was one of three fortresses — with Angelokastro on the west coast and Gardiki in the south — that defended the island, and the Angevins rebuilt its walls after taking Corfu in 1267.

Beaches and coast

The two coasts are different in kind. The west takes the weather and the sunsets: wide sand at Glyfada, the dune-backed stretch at Issos beside the Korission lagoon, and cliffs for much of the rest. The north-east — Ipsos, Dassia and the coves beyond — is pebble and shingle, sheltered by the mainland, with calmer water, which is why families tend to concentrate there.

Inland

The interior is hilly and thickly wooded, carrying several million olive trees planted during the Venetian period and never grubbed up. Footpaths cross it, and the long-distance Corfu Trail runs the length of the island through villages where the tavernas still cook the Corfiot dishes that owe more to Venice than to the rest of Greece: sofrito, pastitsada, bourdeto, bianco. Small secluded coves and hilltop viewpoints over the Ionian sit within reach of most of them.