by Jan Morris
Corfu Town remains recognizably Venetian. Because the Republic held it continuously for 400 years it has an air of civilized constancy and well-being unique among Greek towns. It is hemmed in still between the two fortresses, and its much-loved Esplanade, arcaded by the French in later years, provided with bandstands and gravel cricket pitches by the British, is nothing more than the open field of fire decreed by the engineers of the Old Fort. Tall, jumbled and hung with washing are the houses of Corfu, aggrandized sometimes by the shadowy outline of a palazzo, long since declined to flats or tenements, and crowned here and there with authentically Venetian campaniles, from whose belfries on Sunday mornings properly cracked and fruity bells ring out across the water.
Here are the shady flagged streets of Venice, the arcaded shops, the alleys of ample vegetables and sweet-smelling breads, the skulking market rats, the ingratiating grocers, the nodding black-shawled women, the strolling bravos, the glimpses of sacred pictures through the glazed inner doors of crooked churches. The Venetians brought to Corfu, besides their forts and war-galleys, their coffee-houses, their concerts, their operas and their taste for cultivated dalliance: by the eighteenth century it was the duty of the Venetian naval commander not only to supervise the upkeep and disposition of his ships, but also to arrange for the annual visit of the Commedia dell’ Arte players.
‘All the bad habits of the Corfiotes,’ a British administrator was to write, ‘come from the Venetians.’ He was thinking, no doubt, partly of their somewhat languid temperaments, and certainly there is something very Italianate about the leisurely evening stroll of the Corfiotes up and down the Liston, the paved promenade beside the Esplanade, fast-talking ladies arm in arm, lines of students linked across the pavement, solemn men in Homburg hats, paper under their arm, gravely discussing events in Athens up and down, up and down beneath the trees. The custom was introduced to Corfu by the Venetians, who made it the privilege of the Corfiote nobility and actually named the promenade the Liston after the Lista d’Oro. (And if, by the way, you want to consult that catalogue, where better than the library of the Reading Club, which is housed in a delectable small Venetian palazzo overlooking the bay, and is rich enough in leather, prints, smells of wood and furniture polish, hospitable librarians and savants sunk in ancient narratives, to make the most dedicated scholar of Venetiana, fresh from the libraries of San Marco itself, feel comfortably at home?)
In the country too, for all those Turkish incursions, there are signs of Venice still. Not only did the Venetians build, at the very end of their stay, the island’s first proper roads, but by offering subsidies they clothed all Corfu with the olive tree, whose dark green foliage and now wrinkled trunks set the very tone of the countryside today and seem as immemorial as the rocks themselves. Some of these trees are said to be survivors of the original plantings 600 years ago, and if you want to get a true idea of Venice’s aesthetic impact upon the island, try walking up one of the wooded hills that overlook Corfu Town from the south: for there, looking down over the blue waters that the galleys once patrolled, one can see the red roofs and white walls of the Venetian presence, the bell-towers and the castles, framed between the leaves of the most ineradicable legacy of them all, the olive, which once and for all plucked this island from its Balkan hinterland and made it part of the Mediterranean idea.
Corfu is another Venetian possession where you may see Venetian country houses – not medievally castellated like the Naxos tower-houses, but serene and modestly bucolic, couched in almond trees and gladioli, with wistaria winding its way up the garden cypresses, and anemones sprouting in the shade. At Kothokini, for example, in the rolling country south of Corfu Town, there is a house of the Sardinas family, those counts of Corfu and Mazzorbo. It is not a very big house and has rather a ship-like air to it, even to a flagpole; but it is unmistakably squirely in manner, having a private chapel in its cobbled yard, a big barn, and a little hamlet clustered respectfully around its walls – the Sardinas had the right to give sanctuary to fugitives from the law, and prospered for over several centuries from the fees they charged, not to mention their monopoly of the Corfu salt-pans.
It is a lovely place. Sardinas still own it, and it has kept its style intact. Its low-ceilinged rooms are shabby but gentlemanly, stuffed with quaint curios, and there are family crests about the place, and old portraits, and pedigrees on parchments. It is like Longhi’s Venice transplanted. On a hot afternoon it seems to dream there: as the loud Greek music thumps away from the village radios over the wall, and you sit in the rambly garden with your host beneath the pergola, so there drifts over you the sense of privileged seclusion that must have seduced the Sardinas in the first place.
They were, so to speak, exotics in this simple setting. The holiest Venetian shrine of Corfu is the little church of the Blessed Virgin at Kassiopi, on the north coast. Its site has always been sacred to seafarers. The Romans built a temple there, and for many centuries sailors made a point of stopping there on their voyages to and from the east – Nero offered oblations at Kassiopi on his way to compete as a lute-player in the Isthmian Games at Corinth. A very early Christian church succeeded the temple, and when it was destroyed by the Turks in 1537 the Venetians replaced it with one of their own.
This became exceedingly holy too. Later in the century a young man was unjustly condemned for theft and blinded by order of the Venetian judges. Fraught with pain and despair he wandered sightless around the island until he reached Kassiopi, and there spent the night within the church. He was awakened by gentle hands pressed upon his eyes, and when he opened them he saw the Virgin Mary standing kindly over him. The vision faded, his sight remained, and the news was taken at once to the Bailie, who recognized the event as a miracle and hastened to Kassiopi to make amends. A Mass is celebrated still, every 8 May, to commemorate the day.
But beside the door of the church the Venetians erected a marble plaque rather truer to their memory, I think, than the tale of the blinded boy. It was placed there when the church was rebuilt in 1538, and recorded that, the building having been destroyed by ‘cruel Turkish pirates’, it was reconstructed by three pious Venetians: Niccold Suriano, Proveditor of the Fleet, Filippo Pasqualigo, Commander of the Adriatic Sea, and Pietro Francisco Malipiero, Commander of the Triremes.
Sometimes in the interior of Corfu, in some shaded clearing among the olives, you may notice a tented encampment pitched higgledy-piggledy beneath the trees; and when you stop the car to take a closer look, like jackals out of the wood the gypsies will fall upon you, carrying their babies in their arms – whining, crying, pushing their skinny fingers through the windows, beating on the windscreen, swarming wildly all around, and eventually pursuing you out of sight, as you proceed shakily on your way, with hideous but fortunately unintelligible curses.
Blame the Venetians. The gypsies were encouraged to come to Corfu because of their skill in horse-breeding, and probably nowhere else in Europe did they acquire such standing. Gypsies thrived elsewhere in the Venetian Empire – at Nauplia they were given particular rights of tenure, at Methoni, as we saw for ourselves, they prospered in pigs. Nowhere else, though, were they so institutionalized as they were in Corfu, where every grade of society was somehow fitted into the imperial structure.
There they constituted a feudal fief of their own, under a baron appointed by the Venetians – ‘an office of not a little gain’, so a Corfiote historian assures us, ‘and of very great honour’. Very great power too, for the gypsy baron had almost complete authority over his feudatories. They were his private army. They were his corps of servants. He could punish them how he liked, short of killing them. In 1502 we hear of a Corfiote sea captain receiving the fief as a reward for running the blockade of Methoni, which had just fallen to the Turks; later it went to one of the island’s most eminent scholars, for his services during the Turkish invasion of 1537. Every May Day the gypsies came to town to do honour to their lord. Drums beating, fifes squealing, they marched through the streets carr
ying his feudal banner above them, and setting up a maypole outside his house, sang a peculiar ditty in his praise, and handed over their feudal dues.
In return for all this the gypsies had valuable rights of their own. They could not be conscripted for the galleys, or made to do forced labour for the Republic. They formed their own military unit, under a gypsy commander, and throughout the four centuries of Venetian rule, thanks to these ancient privileges, their horse-copers’ skills and no doubt their evasive woodland ways, they flourished exceedingly. No wonder they have reverted to the predatory now.
A different destiny awaited the Jews of Corfu, whose ghetto still stands in the shadow of the New Fort, in the tangle of narrow streets behind the bus station. It is difficult to identify because since the Nazi occupation of Corfu in World War II it has shrunk from a large and cultured community to a few shops and houses and a solitary synagogue. Almost all its inhabitants were shipped away to slave camps or gas chambers. In the Venetian heyday, though, the Corfu ghetto was the richest and most influential in the empire, and held a peculiar fascination for the Venetians because Judas Iscariot was popularly supposed to have been a Corfiote – a lineal descendant was commonly pointed out to the more gullible travellers, as one of the island’s sights.
The Venetians could never escape Jewry. In all their chief possessions and trading posts they found clusters of Jews, clannish and disputatious, at once disconcerting and indispensable. Jews were the intermediaries and interpreters of their commerce – the Jews of Turkey in the sixteenth century nearly all spoke four or five languages, and sometimes ten or twelve. The Republic was always ambivalent towards them. Perhaps the Venetians felt a little too close to Jewry for their own comfort, for there has always been, in my own view, something Hebrew in the bearing, the enterprise, the style, the separateness and even the look of the Venetians. Much Jewish blood, I do not doubt, went into Venetian veins in the course of their centuries of intercourse with the Levant, and the oriental strain that everyone noted in things Venetian was often less Muslim or Byzantine than Jewish.
At home in Venice the Jews were powerful, but rigidly circumscribed. Shylock could finance his argosies to the east, but the chances were that he was obliged to return at dark to the Jewish quarter of the city, the first of all the ghettos – originally on the island of Giudecca, which took its name from the Jews, then in the north-western corner of the city, on the site of a disused iron-foundry (a getto is a metal-casting). It was the Venetians who invented the idea of a special costume to mark out the Jews – first it was a yellow hat, then a red – and the Jews were harshly taxed, deprived of all civic rights, and once, in 1572, expelled from the Republic altogether.
Not for long, though, because Venice could not do without them. They controlled much of the city’s trade, in spices, woollens, sugar and silks, and they were irreplaceable on Rialto, the central money market. They were respected, too, as people of learning and finesse, and consulted for their scholarship as for their way with money. The rules that governed them were often waived or winked at, and in the daytime they were to be seen on the streets of the city looking anything but persecuted – their ladies, it was said in the sixteenth century, ‘gorgeous in their apparel, jewels, chains of gold and rings… having marvellous long trains like princesses that are borne up by waiting women’.
As at home, so in the colonies: the Jews were generally safe under Venetian rule, if they were seldom easy. The Venetians, being independent sorts of Christians, did not often regard the Jews with the savage fanaticism common in Europe then, but at the same time Jews played a prominent part in the demonology of their empire. Jewish women were blamed for the immorality (and hence disloyalty) of the Cretan cities – in the sixteenth century a Gentile caught there in sexual intercourse with a Jewess could get ten years in the galleys, while the Jewess could be burned. It was a Jewish axeman who had murdered Erizzo, after the fall of Euboea in 1470, and a Jewish executioner who had flayed Bragadino in 1571. It was the Jew, Joseph Nasi, who was generally supposed to have instigated the Turkish attack on Cyprus: certainly he was for many years a formidable commercial rival to the Venetians, with his network of associates all over the east, his agents from the Levant to western Europe and his access to the Sultan’s ear. Another Jew, actually born a Venetian subject, signed on behalf of the Sultan the treaty that gave Cyprus to the Turks; indeed it was partly the association of Jews with the humiliating loss of Cyprus, and with the slow whittling away of Venetian power in the east, that led to the expulsion order of 1572.
But the Jews were never expelled from Corfu. Like the gypsies, they were special there. They had been on the island since the end of the twelfth century, when a Greek-speaking Hebrew colony was established and a synagogue was built – the first example of Greek demotic prose is said to have been a translation of the book of Jonah made by its rabbis. When in 1386 the Corfiote deputation went to Venice to ask for the protection of the Republic, two of the six delegates were Jews; under the Venetians the community grew and flourished and became vital to the workings of the colony. A second synagogue was built. The ghetto, though walled and gated, became the richest quarter of town. The Jews adopted the language of their rulers and were principal bankers and traders of the island. Without them its financial system would have collapsed; it was not Venetian benevolence, but plain self-interest, that exempted the Jews of Corfu from the banishment.
Even here their status was anomalous. Rich and influential though they were, they were forbidden to own land, they were obliged to wear the star of David on their clothing and they were liable always to be enlisted for the more degrading tasks of state, like manning the galleys, or performing that familiar chore of medieval Jewry, executing people. The Greeks were not discouraged from their ancient prejudices against them, and every Easter Saturday, as a substitute for actually stoning them, made a point of dropping old crockery noisily out of their windows, preferably upon passing members of the community.
Still they multiplied and were useful. They fought bravely in the Turkish siege of 1715: the Venetian mercenary commander, the German Count Johann von der Schulenburg, was so impressed that he suggested to the Signory the settling of more Jews in the island, if only for their military aptitude. By the end of Venetian rule in Corfu the Jews were said to have constituted more than a quarter of the whole population, making the island the nearest thing to Zion that existed. Nobody mourned the fall of Venice more than the Jews of Corfu, and with reason, for never again, under any successor government, did they achieve such power and prosperity, and in the end the worst of all the empires, arriving similarly out of the north, took them away and killed them. To the end their vernacular remained the Venetian dialect of Italian.
A few have come back since, and one of the synagogues is alive again. Next door to it the president of the community has a television shop, and a few other Jews keep shops and run businesses in the neighbourhood. They do not seem very happy. They still hear the clatter of the crockery on Easter Saturday. They show you their Auschwitz tattoos and conduct you round the synagogue with a trace of sad resentment.
Six other islands – Paxos, Cephalonia, Levkas, Homer’s Ithaca, Zakinthos and distant Kithira, around the point of Greece – constituted with Corfu the Venetian possession of the Ionians. Zakinthos, Zante, which after 1500 took the place of Methoni as principal port of call on the eastern route, prospered by the export of currants to England, and on it the Venetians built what is said to have been the loveliest of all their colonial towns, a perfect set-piece around a bay: hardly a stone remains of it, for it was utterly destroyed in the great earthquake of 1953. Cephalonia had a great castle and in later years a dear little opera house, visited frequently by companies from Venice. Ithaca, left entirely empty after a Turkish raid in 1479, was repopulated by the Venetians and, although only ten miles round, boasted a Captain of the Island and one full-blown noble family. As for Kithira, the Eye of Crete, far away to the south, it had a garrison, three castles and, in 15
45, 1,850 inhabitants; most of its budget, its Rector once reported, went on the courier service by which it kept Iraklion informed of possible Turkish attacks.
All these islands remained Venetian until the fall of the Republic in 1797, and the Venetian style was deeply imprinted on them. In the 1920s it was said that the general social pattern of Corfiote life, from land tenure to snobbery, was still fundamentally Venetian: Venetian titles were still commonly used, Italian was widely spoken. Venice kept these islands western islands, during the long Turkish domination of Greece, and to this day the Greek patois of the mainland is full of Turkish idioms, but the patois of the Ionians is thick with Italianisms. When the curtain goes up in the Cephalonia theatre this evening, when the lights go on in the exquisite waterfront houses of Corfu, when the coffee is brought into the Kothokini drawing-room, and the diligent old scholars of the Reading Club, adjusting their bifocals, search in the shelves for another volume of Saint-Sauveur’s Voyages Historiques, Littéraires et Pittoresques – at all these moments the more benevolent shades of imperial Venice stir and smile complacently.
Throughout the Ionians Venetian rule was to be remembered, all in all, affectionately. It had kept them from the Turks, it had respected the Orthodox faith, it had brought periods of prosperity, it had given the islands the most beautiful towns in Greece. But most important of all, more by diffidence than by design it had preserved in trust the Hellenism of the islands, and so for once carved itself an honourable place in the rolls of empire. The Venetians may not much have admired the Greek manner of life and they did their best to temper it with their architecture, their protocol, their alien social forms, their operas and their pageantries. They were not much interested in Greek classicism, except for those tangible artefacts, like headless lions or convenient column-heads, which they could ship away to ornament their palaces at home. But under their aegis Corfu, like Crete before it, became a haven and a refuge for everything that was alive and creative in Greekness.