Lazaretto Island

Just over two miles off the village of Kontokali on Corfu, the tiny islet of Lazaretto covers barely seven hectares — about 17 acres — yet carries one of the Ionian's heaviest histories. Known before Venetian rule as Agios Dimitrios, it lies opposite the Kontokali and Gouvia shoreline, two nautical miles northeast of Corfu Town, and today it is visited far less for its scenery than for what happened on it.

From Monastery to Quarantine Station

A monastery was built on the islet in the early 16th century, during the long period of Venetian rule over Corfu. Later in the same century a leprosarium was established there, and it is from this that the island took its present name: the Venetians called such institutions lazzaretti, after Lazzaretto Vecchio in the Venetian lagoon, and the term came to describe any small island near a port used to isolate the sick.

Corfu's lazaretto served the harbour in exactly that way. Ships bound for the port were required to spend forty days in isolation off the islet before being allowed in, with crews held on the spot and cargo and mail disinfected, usually by fumigation. The role outlasted several changes of ruler. In 1798 the Russo-Turkish fleet took the island during the fighting over the French-held Ionians and used it as a military hospital; under British administration the leprosarium was renovated and reopened in 1814; and after Corfu's union with Greece in 1864 the buildings saw only occasional use.

The War Years and the Executions

During World War II the Italian occupation authorities turned the islet into a concentration camp for prisoners of the Greek National Resistance. The isolation that had once made it useful as a quarantine station now made it useful as a place to hold and kill people out of sight, and the executions did not stop when the war ended. Through the Greek Civil War of 1946 to 1949 and its aftermath, condemned political prisoners were brought over from the prisons of Corfu and shot against the old perimeter wall. 111 executions are documented for the years 1947 to 1949, with March 1948 the worst single month, while relatives' associations put the true total closer to 200. The last recorded execution on the islet took place in November 1954.

What survives has deliberately been left as it stands. The roofless church of Agios Dimitrios, a two-storey block that served as the Italian command building, and the stretch of quarantine wall used for the shootings are all still there, the wall still fitted with the bronze rings to which the condemned were bound. Behind it lies the cemetery of the executed, laid out with marble crosses in two symmetrical rows. Families made their first organised visit in 1978 and a memorial society followed a few years later; the site was placed under state protection as a historic monument in 1992, and ownership passed to the Municipality of Corfu under a law of 2012. A commemoration is held there every year.

Visiting by Boat

Lazaretto can be reached only by boat and has no facilities of any kind — no water, no shade, no landing infrastructure beyond the old pier — so anyone going ashore should carry what they need for the visit. The western side offers a calm, sheltered anchorage, protected from the prevailing summer winds by the bulk of Corfu itself, and the islet is almost never crowded; on memorial days it is better left to the families who come to it. Swimming and watersports are discouraged out of respect for the site, though the beaches on the facing Corfu shore at Kontokali and Alykes Potamou look straight across at it. Despite its grim past, Lazaretto's sheltered anchorage and calm, forest-fringed shoreline make it an easy, low-key detour from Corfu Town, and many charter guests exploring Greece anchor here for the afternoon before continuing north along the coast.