A Dream Comes True for Me

Friday, 01 October

I have longed to visit Kerkyra (Corfu, to us English speakers) ever since I read the book My Family and Other Strange Animals by Gerald Durrell, the great naturalist. He lived there for five years as a boy, immediately before World War II, and his descriptions of it so charmed and fascinated me that I’ve wanted to see the place for myself ever since, and today, that dream began to come true.

First we took the bus to Igoumenitsa, the small port from which the ferries run to Corfu and other Ionian islands.

Apparently, there’s a law in Greece that bus journeys four hours long or longer must include a stop, so passengers can rest and eat and so forth. (There are no lavatories aboard Greek buses.) So it was a pleasant trip in two 2-hour segments with a 15-minute break between. The first third of the route is through a fertile plain, as far as Berea (Beroia), where the Jews in St. Paul’s day were “nobler” than the Jews in Thessaloniki, because instead of rejecting the Gospel outright, they “searched the Scriptures” to see if the prophetic descriptions of Messiah did indeed describe Jesus of Nazareth. From Berea on, the landscape is mountainous, and the mountains are quite rugged.

We walked a few hundred meters to the port in Igoumenitsa and quickly found a ferry about to sail to Corfu. We bought tickets and hurried aboard.

The Nireas is a huge ferry. Its bottom deck holds 18-wheeler trucks, plural, and about two dozen cars. And it’s smaller than some of the other ferries.

We found seats on the top deck, near the bow, for a great view for the nearly 2-hour cruise.

Land was never out of sight. In fact, you can see the island of Corfu from the beginning, plus several other islets.

Corfu is a sickle-shaped island, or so they say; to me, its shape is more like a seahorse. The main town, also called Corfu, is at about she seahorse’s chest level. To the north, the land rises to a tall mountain named Pantocrator. From our vantage point, the whole island just looked like a long strip (60 kilometers long, 36 miles) with mountains crowning one end.

The city, as it came into view, quite matched the picture in my imagination. The first thing you see is an ancient and enormous stone fortress guarding the harbor, and then, eventually, two of them.

The Venetians occupied this island for over 400 years; hence, the city looks very much like Venice, sans canals. The buildings are tall and narrow with tall, shuttered windows, the shutters being, well, like venetian blinds (fancy that) in wood. There are balconies in fancy wrought-iron. The favorite colors for buildings are shades of pink, peach, and gold.

The harbor has two ports, the Old Port and the New Port, plus a marina where small craft bob in the phleesmos. That’s the Greek word for the soft sound of the water lapping against the shore.

We took a cab to our hotel, the Hotel Arcadion, which turned out to be in the heart of the town, right on the main square, called the Spianada.

The Spianada was kept open, originally, to make a clear firing ground between the two forts. Nowadays it contains a bandstand and a cricket field. Yes, cricket! That’s left over from the days when Corfu was an English protectorate. There was a match in progress, too, the players in long, white trousers, white knitted shirts, and white shoes.

There are many cafes spilling out onto the sidewalks, and there are horse-drawn carriages for tourists, and there are, even now in October, crowds of tourists.

We decided to rest in our room and wait there for our rented car to be delivered. To tell you the truth, I was very nervous about that, because it was immediately AFTER I had made the reservation online that I noticed there was no real contact information online, only a post office box for an address. And I had given them all the credit card information.

However, it all turned out well. A ring from the front desk informed us that our car had arrived, and we went down and did the paperwork in the lobby and the very nice man showed us where he had parked the car, and the price was reasonable.

The eatery forming the ground floor of our hotel was, of all things, a MacDonalds! Yes, I said! Every American needs a hamburger from time to time, and I hadn’t had one since arriving in Greece. So that’s where we had our little supper.

Then we set out to explore our surroundings on foot.

“On foot” is an optimistic thing to say in Corfu. Unless you have good, non-skid shoes, “on arse” might be more appropriate. The streets are paved in polished stone that often looks like marble and probably is. These stones are very slippery, and my shoes had smooth leather soles. Fortunately, I only slipped once and Demetrios caught me so I didn’t fall. But, as when wlking on ice, one needs a lot of caution.

The first thing we did was go to the Church of St. Spyridon, the patron saint of Corfu. He was a shepherd, originally, and later the Bishop of Corfu. He was also one of the Fathers at the Council of Nicaea, who hammered out the Creed. He worked many miracles during his lifetime and has continued to work them ever since. His incorrupt body is sometimes displayed. He is often seen on this island, still doing his holy and sometimes miraculous work. His slippers need replacing every couple of years. (??? Presumably it’s not the corpse that gets up and walks around? Presumably it’s his spirit? Or is it that pilgrims keep kissing those slippers?)

We arrived just in time; vespers was over and the church was about to be locked up. Never mind; we found the casket, a very ornate one in brass, in a chapel to the right of the altar. A couple of dozen brass lampadas are hanging above it, many of them lit. We venerated the Saint and felt lumps in our throats. I don’t know why. We don’t know enough about the great saint for this experience to have been all that moving for us, yet it very much was. In fact, I (very mistakenly) felt that now I had done the main thing in Corfu; now, I thought, I could leave any time and be perfectly content.

So, besides the dozens of sidewalk cafes, there are all the predictable tourist shops with tacky souvenirs, most of the items blue or blue-green. In Corfu, there are a lot of upscale shops as well, selling Italian shoes in amazing designs, and designer handbags and jewelry and embroidered tablecloths and Armani clothing.

Ignore all those! (Unless you came for them.) Just admire the quaint buildings, the stone balustrades, the narrow alleys and the picture-book feeling.

We stepped out into one of those alleyways, unlit, and immediately found ourselves out of the tourist district, although still in the historic heart of the city.

A young bitch, a Black Lab, was trying desperately to open a cardboard carton that sat near a dumpster. I opened it for her. Inside was a plastic bag full of yummy garbage.

“Now she’s going to get it all over the street,” said Demetrios.

“That’s okay. Doggie deserves a meal, too.” Besides, the building in front of which she was going to strew it looked abandoned; there were no lights inside it.

She wolfed down her meal in about five huge bites. But then, no fool, she attached herself to us.

We continued through some unlit streets, admiring the surrealistic, Venetian city, when we heard something that sounded like a trombone. “Kid practicing,” I said, smiling.

Then we heard another horn, higher pitched. Two kids practicing?”

And then we came to the Kapodistria Philoharmonia Academy of Corfu, still accompanied by the little bitch. (Kapodistria, after whom the Academy is named, was the statesman who wrote the Greek Constitution. He once wrote a constitution for Russia, as well, and he’s the one who organized Switzerland into cantons.)

Three young men stood outside the Academy, chatting. The oldest of them (fortyish) came over to us to answer Demetrios’ questions, and a long conversation followed. The Black Lab lay down on the pavement to wait it out. Two pre-adolescent boys began calling to her and petting her.

Eventually Demetrios asked the handsome young man, Ioannis, whether we could see the inside of the building, and Ioannis said certainly, come right in. And he proceeded to show us around. Here are the practice rooms, here is a picture of us playing in Paris, and here we are at the Olympics in Athens, and here is our first and founding maestro. And here are our uniforms (red with white trim) and our helmets (brass). And this is me… Turns out Ioannis is an instructor of Percussion at the Academy. And what they call a “philharmonia” is a marching band.

Corfu, said Ioannis, is very musical. There are 17 marching bands on the Island, each with its own maestro and its own uniforms, but this is the oldest, the original band.

And then, from his desk, he took a small, shield-shaped banner, red with black fringe and a black, printed picture of Kapodistrias. It’s the kind of banner you hang from, say, a trumpet when you’re in a parade. And this he asked us to keep. So now we have a unique souvenir of Corfu! We certainly shall prize this little banner.

We thanked him profusely and went our way. Ioannis said if we wanted to come back at nine o’clock, there would be a rehearsal we might enjoy, but we were tired and ready tor an early bed. We had to get up very early again in the morning, because we were to meet David and Julia down at the port at 8:00.

The Black Lab had disappeared, presumably to attach herself to one of the boys who had been playing with her. Seldom have I ever parted with such regret from a dog. But then if I were to adopt every dog that has broken my heart to leave, I’d have dozens of them, plus unnumbered cats.