The Greek Islands Read Online Free Page B

On the other hand the Albanian mountains which girdle the landward coast are snow-capped all winter, so that the island, despite its Tibetan-looking foreground, enjoys mildness and becomes a veritable sun trap.
    In classical times, Corfu and the opposite mainland were famous for their flourishing oak trees (remember that Dodona is only 130 kilometres east); but this is no longer the case. The uplands on both sides of the straits are bare and rocky; they have been stripped. In Corfu itself, what the Venetians gave with one hand they took back with the other – their shipyards in Govino Bay were once extensive; now only a few ruins remain. On the Epirote Hills, the damage was mostly due to the Napoleonic wars. Both British and French Governments bought great quantities of wood from Ali Pacha in order to fit out their fleets. When you think that at least two thousand oaks (not counting other trees) were needed to build one ship of the line … Whole forests were swallowed up in this way.
    But there is little point in reciting the long bead-roll of visitors and those who called here because they were en route for somewhere else and found the island on their way; Nero, heading for the Isthmian Games, at which he was to bestow all the first prizes upon himself, and end by ordering the Isthmus of Corinth to be dug, is a case in point.
    It would be fair to consider his case as an early form ofislomania. His concern with the Corinth canal was neither aesthetic nor utilitarian – he simply had a fancy to turn the Peloponnesus into an island. It would be more to the point to speak of Tiberius, that specialist in choice holiday places, who actually made a villa at Cassiopi upon the rocky northern point. Strangely enough, he did the same in Rhodes on a similar point with roughly the same exposure: a headland over the water, situated in a gulf crowned with tall mountains. Cato, Pompey, Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra … to the devil with the lot of them! In a later epoch came a visitation which aroused many an echo – The Duse and D’Annunzio chose the island as a place in which to consummate a somewhat stagey love affair. The villa is still pointed out. Noël Coward was devoured there by a flea, or so he told me.
    The first sea battle in the history of ancient Greece took place between the Corinthians who had settled Corfu and the Corfiots themselves. The latter won; but it was like the closing bars of an overture which ushers in the long senseless chain of invasions and attacks, plagues and famines which have followed right up to this day. At the outbreak of the last war the Italians used the island for target practice and did the town a great deal of damage; but the saint reacted in characteristic fashion, and it is said that during the greatest raid the citizens of the town (or as many as could) huddled into the church and escaped unscathed, for it was almost the only public building to escape a hit. For a long time Spiridion had not done very much except make routine cures for epilepsy or religious doubts. But this was a return to full form, and it once again reminded the people of Corfu that this same old saint had once dispersed fleets, riding upon the afternoon mistral to do so, and even repulsed the plague more than once – it whisked off with a shriek in the form of a black cat. Perhaps it is really due to him that the merciful sleep of nescience descends on all who come here?The fact remains that even the Turks when they landed 30,000 troops and ravaged the island in 1537 felt something equivocal in the air which made them nod. They too retired after a while, though they took 15,000 islanders with them as slaves.
    The Ionian Islands were, even in modern times, a bone of contention between the great powers. By the Treaty of Tilsit the French were authorized to assume their jurisdiction. They stayed from 1808 to 1814, outfacing the severe British blockade. Indeed they only left after the Treaty of Paris was signed which placed