The Greek Islands Read Online Free PDF Page A

the islands under the jurisdiction of Britain. The British suzerainty was ended only in 1864, when Britain ceded the islands to the newly born Greek kingdom.
    The British occupation, which lasted for so long, yielded a rich harvest of memoirs and official dispatches, and a richer gallery of notable eccentrics and famous figures like Gladstone whose infectious Philhellenism was not echoed a century later when the Cyprus issue raised its head. More’s the pity. There is no place in the world where the English are more enjoyed and admired than on the island of Prospero.
    As for what they left behind, the cricket comes upon one as rather a shock – the noble sweep of the main Esplanade with its tall calm trees is suddenly transformed into an English cricket field, though the pitch is one of coconut-matting. Under the charmed and astonished eye of the visitor a marquee is run up and two teams dressed in white take possession of the ground. It is highly professional and would do justice to Lord’s.
    What is singular is the deep and pensive appreciation of the game in an audience very largely consisting of Greek peasants who have never had the chance to play it. They have presumably come in to town to shop from some nearby village, and now here they are, apparently deeply engrossed in this foreign game while their fidgeting mules are tied to trees on the Esplanade . The audience for the match, apart from them, consists ofyoung soldiers from the garrison, tourists, waiters, an occasional bank-clerk playing hookey, a dawdling postman. On all their dark, intent faces you see a deep concern, a quiet appraisal and appreciation of the game in progress; its white ritual, and its measured cadences seem to sit well with a Mediterranean rhythm. Moreover, they applaud in the right places, and catch their breaths at any notable stroke with authentic delight. Perhaps , in all their dark intentness, what they really see is something like the white-clad figures racing upon some Minoan vase-painting to soar over a rearing bull. There is a tie between sport and ritual, for one must have grown out of the other.
    From almost everywhere in the town one can hear the characteristic click-clock of the ball on the bat, and the rounds of applause. Once upon a time it was mingled with the stately popping of ginger-beer bottles, which as ritual objects, together with drop scones, lingered on in the coloured marquee until about 1937–8. But cricket is not yet just a dead ritual; it is still flourishing among the children of Corfu, for everywhere in town you will find the chalked up practice-wicket on the walls of the houses, for all the world as if one were in the East End of London.
    Yet, after your first adventure with the Greek light and your initial rapture at the beauty of the landscape, you may feel slightly restless. The lack of classical remains will probably be the cause of it. The shop front, the foreground of the picture, so to speak, is most vividly filled in with an Offenbach-like array of historical remains – eloquent of France, Britain, Venice, Turkey; but with the advent of Byzance, history seems to lose its outlines. Everything becomes submerged in myth and in poetry. (How did Odysseus find the place?) Somehow the fine tomb of old Menecrates seems rather a slender offering.
    At this stage, you should go and visit the Medusa in the Corfu Museum. For she, the mother of the Gorgons, wasobviously the warden to the chthonic Greek world just as St Spiridion was the warden of the Byzantine world and the modern . The Medusa, more than life-size, is something which profoundly hushes the mind and heart of the observer who is not insensitive to myth embodied in sculpture. The insane grin, the bulging eyes, the hissing ringlets of snake-like hair, the spatulate tongue stuck out as far as it will go – no wonder she turned men to stone if they dared to gaze on her! She has a strange history, which is not made easier to understand by the fact that