'On this Island...'

I first saw the seashore as a toddler. I was on a day trip with mum from York in May 1944 when Dad, his armoured regiment of Shermans maneuvering on the moors preparing for invasion, had a brief furlough. On the sand at Bridlington - or was it Scarborough - there were caltrop shaped tank obstacles mixed with barbed wire; the sea unapproachable. I first saw the sea as it should be when I was about 5 or 6 on a coach we'd boarded in London taking my great grandmother, Lucy Halkett (1866-1966) and my 4 year old sister for a week in Bournemouth. The driver stopped the coach on a gentle slope above the town on the edge of the New Forest so all on board could catch a glimpse of the start of their holiday - first sight of a blue horizon distinctly above the intervening trees. It was so wonderfully straight. ‘The sea!’ the children cried, other passengers too "the sea!". That was on a single highway like all the roads of the time before the coming of bypasses, dual carriageways and motorways. 

May has been different in Greece this year - 2025. News from home in Gloucestershire is of sunshine for days. Here it’s been cool. The shallow valleys below Ano Korakiana chilly in the evening. There've been regular showers and full nights of rain - all of which, with the hot times between 11.00 and 5.00 has been good for vegetables and the gift of wildflowers in the uncut meadows and along the verges I pass almost every day on my bicycle. 

A road between Doukades and Skripero

On May 1st Lin and I observed the tradition of turning a bunch of collected wildflowers and grasses into a wreath to display on the wall of the house, celebrating Πρωτομαγιά - a pre-Christian ritual coaxing food from the soil, not needed at the moment. The sun dries out the wreath in no time. On midsummer evening the wreaths are piled together and burned as young people leap together over the smoke and flames. It still happens. Our rather temporary Papas Evthokimos, unmarried and and just out of a monastery forbade the celebration which under Papa Costas - here 30 years until he died to lie beside St Athanasios Church - was allowed even encouraged - in the appropriative style of Christianity - in the yard of Agios Georgios, the village’s main church. 

“Why do people go to church?” asks our Dutch friend Gerard, bemused. I enjoy such questions and the surrounding silence. 

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent*” said the philosopher. Wittgenstein didn’t intend to limit enquiry or shy away from reason but he had a wise recognition of its potential clumsiness - note his imperative ‘must’ - treading softly in places where intuition has the greater reach. It was about being polite. Jenny, with Dutch no-nonsense puts me to gentle shame if I break silence with some derivative anthropological explanation “Simon, You are only interested in these things because you are very old and soon you will be dead.” Which is probably true. In the dusk of my long life I’m a lapsed atheist. I enjoy listening to famous atheists speaking of the utter ‘lack of evidence’ and, in Richard Dawkins’ case, kind puzzlement that anyone should be so mentally ‘avid’, as to need more than the ability to see and explore the wondrous beauty of the universe - infinite layers of the macro and micro - revealed again and again over eons by science and sweet reason. 

View from Ano Korakiana towards Vido Island on the edge of the Sea of Kerkyra

I sit on our balcony here and gaze across the horizons - to the east the sea of Corfu, as serene as an inland lake (some visitors mistake it so), between us - inland just over three miles - and the mainland of Epirus. With my old East German Zeiss monocular I examine distant fishing boats, and even smaller pleasure boats hired in season and yachts out for a day sail or cruising further between the town and Benitses or Cassiopi, north and south or further to the mainland port of Sayada or Parga or Preveza or other Ionian islands, Levkada, Paxos, anti-Paxos, Ithaca, Cephalonia and Zakinthos. 

The sea of Kerkyra lies just south of the channel between Corfu and Albania, a small diversion from the larger Adriatic, leading by a gentle course change eastwards to the port of Igoumenitsa whose ferries ply daily between Greece and the Italian ports of Bari, Brindisi, Ancona and Venice. We’ve sailed on all those routes over the 20 years we’ve lived here - now accredited ‘residents’ of Greece.  I see in a compressed view the smaller ferries - sometimes three even four at a time - coming and going to and from Igoumenitsa 40 kilometres away to Corfu, steering on azimuth.Watched for a while their courses follow a long gentle curve between the mainland and here, hiding all but their upper works behind the woods on Vido island opposite Corfu's main port. I glimpse occasional coasting tankers bringing fuel to the marina at Gouvia; also cargo ships carrying I don’t know what since I don’t see them dock in Corfu. Colossal cruise ships glide like moving tower blocks between the Tyrrhenian, and Adriatic to the Aegean sea and the Gulf of Corinth, docking for the day in Corfu, their passengers boarding coaches to the Old Port Square to join a leisurely bustle up and down the city's narrow paved streets. 

'... Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands;
And the full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter....' from Auden's 'On this Island'

The shore of the Sea of Kerkyra at Ipsos (photo: Richard Baddeley)

*Wittgenstein's notes say such concepts as 'God, beauty, justice, love' are essential in being a human, but speaking of them cheapens our understanding of them. Other means of expression take over when words fail to express; other forms of art - poetry, rituals.

The six year citrus plague

 Ano Korakiana, Corfu - Albania and mother Greece across the Sea of Kerkyra

Our home in Birmingham - in the distance St Mary's Church tower amid the woods of Handsworth Park

Since 2006 we've travelled to-and-fro - πέρα δόθε - between out home in Handsworth Birmingham, where Lin and I have lived 45 years, and our home on Democracy Street in Ano Korakiana. Returning to the village after months away in England is a 'moment'. Will the power come on in the house? Will the taps flow? Will damp from rain have leaked down a wall? Will rats, mice or insects have been partying while we’re away? Has something died under, or worse, in a bed? It takes two days of errands - sweeping the curtilage, opening the door of the apothiki, hanging a tarp on hooks and bungees below the balcony against rain on the terrace, opening shutters; replacing a battery on the kitchen clock to set it ticking to local time; putting out balcony furniture stored indoors for winter; opening shutters; sweeping and vacuuming up dust; stocking shelves and fridge with the food bought on our first day’s big shop before dispensing with the hire car that Lin has driven up to the village; checking the tyres and charging the battery of my e-bike; making sure we have internet connection; greeting Vasiliki next door with embraces and kisses; being welcomed with words and smiles by neighbours, including Theodora and Pepe, her mum, in their bread shop. Then gardening and housework. 

*** ** ***

After 12 years of living to-and-fro between Greece and England, Linda and I arrived in Corfu for Easter 2018 - six years ago. We discovered to growing dismay that our blood orange tree and two lemon trees were thoroughly infested with minute constellations of insects on the underside of their leaves, the leaves'  upper surfaces covered in black mould. Scale insects had invaded and infested our citrus trees and were spreading through the whole island of Corfu. 'Sooty mould' had fixed itself, thriving in the wet of winter, over the surface of billions of leaves, preventing them absorbing light and breathing the carbon dioxide that produces glucose – photosynthesis vital to life. 

Female scale insects on the underside of citrus leaves

Citrus trees were suffocating across the island. Mould had spread over their trunks and branches; over the ground and up the sides of the low walls of the terrace, blackening the plaka on gardens, terraces and verandas. Everywhere. Driving, we glimpsed, beside the roads amid healthy burgeoning greenery, orchards of blackened citrus trees, mould smirching their remaining fruit. Some people had repainted trees with whitewash, sawn off larger branches, leaving amputated trunks. 

Sooty mould on a leaf's upper surface

What had happened? We asked questions of a local agronomists; researched the spread of citrus scale insects on the internet and spoke to other villagers. There was no memory of similar plagues, though the internet swiftly revealed the global ubiquity of citrus scale insect infestation, explaining how it worked, but not the provenance of these insects of the species Hemiptera, one of many sap feeders that, as well as scale insects, include aphid and whitefly. The male scale insect, short lived, can fly around spreading the infestation. In their thousands these insects stuck to the paper traps we hung in our trees. 

Male scale insects trapped

The females, once clustered on the underside of leaves remain immobile, sucking sap from the leaves with hair-like probosces, excreting honeydew that spreads to the leaves’ upper surfaces. Sooty mould, present like dust in the surrounding air, fixes on the honeydew. Ants, clambering about the garden, milk the female citrus scale insects producing more honeydew and more mould. called Cladosporium and Alternaria - widespread airborne fungi whose spores thrive on damp year around, now fixed by the scale insects’ syrup, growing and spreading, strangling our citrus trees. 

This was our last harvest of lemons, fruit already blackened by the sooty fungus. Oranges had fallen from their tree the previous winter. For years no blossom appeared and more or less all the other citrus trees on the island produced no fruit. We saw blackened skeleton trees everywhere - with now and then a survivor that must have held some unknown prophylactic, as well as promise. We asked around about what preventive measures had been taken. No answers. No pesticides were working. 

White protective coat on dead scale insects

On advice we dissolved olive oil soap and cooking oil fixative and sprayed. This may, with our sticky paper traps, have slowed down the effects of the infestation. I wrapped sticky paper round tree trunks or painted duct tape wrapped round them with a very sticky tinned product from a garden shop. This stopped most ants getting into the foliage, though in their ant-like ways some died creating walkways with their bodies for their fellows to climb on up. Two lots of sticky bands one above the other on a trunk lessened the toxic symbiosis of ants and scale insects.

Preventing ants meeting scale insects

Scale insects are ‘hard’ or ‘soft’. These were hard.  While feeding on cells just under the surface of leaves, as well as producing honeydew, they excrete waste to form a waxy covering that protects them from sprays – tho’ not entirely. Looking at leaves with a magnifying glass Lin reckoned this explained white rings around the insect clusters. Pressing down on these clusters, after spraying, we could smear them off the leaves. Were they dead? Was this the female scale insects’ immobility? The internet told us the insects’ protective cover remains on leaves for years. By the second year of this horrid plague our friendly agronomist at a nearby garden centre offered us two kinds of remedy – a diluted mixture to kill the female insects attached under the leaves; another dilute to inhibit their reproductive cycle. “Will this kill them?” I asked her “Yes” She said “But will they die screaming in agony?” I asked. “Yes assuredly” she said with a smile, noting my unscientific animosity to these pests that nature had turned on us via the lemon and orange bounty, which outside of a wealthy winter garden, we could never have enjoyed further north. Year after year we sprayed and sprayed at two week intervals. The insects died. More arrived and still no sign of blossom. Leaves that were not entirely blackened turned mottled yellow and dessicated. 

I could no longer pop out our front door bump a tree with my shoulder and collect a lemon to squeeze on food, add to salad dressings, make citron pressé on sweltering days, mix myself, and guests, margaritas. 

Tequila, lemon, triple sec, salted glass

Lin could no longer make her lemon ice creams - served cold and hard inside scraped out lemon halve. We could no longer enjoy watching the seasonal changes from blossom, to tiny but expanding green lemons to knobbly skinned yellow fruits hanging in fecund clusters amid the greenery, dropping now and then with gentle thuds to be collected for us and neighbours, and to take to England where, if green, they last for weeks gradually turning yellow in our kitchen. In November 2012 I’d put lemons, brought from Greece, with other small treasures of her childhood, in my mum's coffin in the Highlands. We served an orange dessert made by halving a juicy blood orange, adding cherry liqueur and serving the halves, heated in the microwave, with a chunk of walnut ice cream gradually melting into the liqueured orange; and Lin, after a neighbour's tutoring, made orange pie – portokalopita.  There had, until 2018, been a ready supply of fresh orange easily squeezed. Now the orange tree suffered even more than the lemon trees. We watched its blackened branches becoming barer of leaves, atrophying into dead wood and parched twigs falling to the ground like dry bones. 

One evening we discussed the plague with our naturalist friends the Swedish herpetologists Bo and Marie Stille, living in Kokkini below the Ropa valley. Bo reckoned there was little we humans could do; that we must wait for predators on the scale insects and for the trees to develop a natural resistance to these parasites. “Trees, like all living things, learn.” 

Our friend Mark said that part of the problem was that lemons and oranges, though widespread, play no part - as once they did - in the island’s economy so there’s no research money, no prophylactic policies, no advice to people with citrus trees. So although we did continue spraying in hope, and as a means to torture these wicked vile depraved and evil insects. We also scoured the blackened surfaces of walls and plaka with an efficient bleach – Durochlor - bought from Ionic Chemicals a kilometre north of Tzavros, off the Paleokastritsa Road.

Then in the autumn of 2023 came a glimmer of hope. The scale insects were still fixing themselves to the underside of leaves but we began to see blossom – first on the lemon trees and a few on even the blighted orange tree. We rejoiced when that tree produced six oranges, but wondered if the tree, rather than making a recovery, was now enfeebled beyond hope by the years of infestation. We were told by Eleni, local agronomist at the garden shop on the main road near Tzolou – T-junction into the village – that predator pests had arrived, that the government had even introduced ‘nemetodes’. "So no more spraying" she advised "lest you kill the good insects." 

In 2024 we arrive in Ano Korakiana the first week of April. Wonder of wonders – the lemon trees are fecund with fruit, green and yellow clusters, while the orange tree is covered, top to bottom in florets, with their lovely smell. In weeks that blossom had set amid burgeoning foliage full of hundreds and hundreds of little green oranges swelling by the day.

Beside the bougainvillea, our orange tree, with signs of wear, but burgeoning again

Young oranges to be spotted amid reinvigorated foliage

A billiard ball sized orange coated with rain and wind born sand from Africa

How our orange tree was in 2017 before the arrival of the plague. How it will be again.

Windfall lemons - a daily harvest again

“Which side, then, has committed more crimes here, the Right or the Left?”

A note to Iason Athanasiadis 'A sense of the region as a unit'? What a challenge - to make sense of any region prior to the super-imposition of its formal boundaries, negotiated by powerful men, as shown on 'political' atlases with separate colourings, titles and occasional coincidences with the natural features - rivers, deserts, mountain ranges, lakes - that we also see on those atlases that focus on terrain alone, or those created by old explorers with monsters and angels. I've been enjoying Mark Mazower's 2021 history - 'The Greek Revolution' - trying to make sense of 'the Morea' and 'Rumeli' and peoples who called themselves 'Rhōmaîoi', and the myriad ways their inhabitants identified themselves as individuals and social groups before the 'Romeiko'. 

Decades ago my stepfather was trying to make sense of 'the Balkans' and the term 'Balkanisation'. "In many places the peasants heard the soldiers coming, fled and hid in the woods, caves and cellars, and then, when the marauders had moved on, emerged to wander the smoking ruins, slaughtered animals and pillaged barns, they asked themselves 'In what country are we in now?". 

I, with feelings for Greece that you know, balk when my half-Greek brother, fiercely proud of his Greek ancestry - George Pericles Baddeley (my photo is of George and Dad in 1968)

- muttered that 'we' Greeks are a bunch of 'Balkan mongrels'. My dad, John Baddeley CMG, fluent in Greek, married to Maria Roussen (my spelling), previously wife of Yiannis Moralis, having invited me to Athens when I was 16 in 1957 ...

Yannis Moralis "Portrait of Maria Roussin", 1941 

... sat me in a cafe in Kolonaki and ordered us two diplos sketos διπλός σκέτος. When they arrived my dad pointed at each little dark brown drink and their accompanying glasses of water "That's Greek and that's Turkish. If you really want to try to understand this country you need to understand the difference between them."

I hope you'll share what you learn about pre-partitioned Thrace. Kevin Andrews (The Flight of Ikaros, (1959)) p.185: On his way towards Kalamata on a route up to the Langádha Pass, Andrews sees a village with burned-out houses. No-one locally will tell him who is responsible. A little later, a man on his road, a merchant refugee from Smyrna with a ‘thin cultivated voice’, offers his donkey to carry Andrews’ pack. They talk as they walk. Andrew feels it safer to ask ‘the question to which' he writes 'I had long been seeking the answer': 

“Which side, then, has committed more crimes here, the Right or the Left?”
“I can only tell you the side that happens to have most power in one district or another also has the most opportunity to commit them.” ’

Perhaps you need a map of the distribution of power in earlier Thrace. 

Nymphes in Corfu ~ May 2024 (photo: Richard Baddeley)

 

The Greek Revolution

For once during this greyest of Mays the sky's cloudless, blue as eyes but for a small cloud the size of a man's hand over a southern mountain. My bicycle is loaded with onions, a box of village rosé, a loaf, firestarters, dried sausage and a role of black plastic sacks. The countryside is jocund. The verges of roads and gravel tracks are dense with yellow, blue, pink, and red flowers. The kokkuyia trees are blushing with guilt. Easter's over. Kristos Anesti.  Lin said "I also need garlic and parsley" but only when I'd got home after bouncing the bicycle down 13 steps to the house. I have a cup of tea then go out again, up the steps helped by the e-bike's 'walk' gear, and back to the mainroad - 2 kilometres - then westward towards Skripero to the nearest grocer. I've looked up 'parsley' - maidones. They have it. Good. The breeze even in early afternoon is still  cold.

June - the descent from Democracy Street is like taking off. First there's an ascent of 50 metres, then round a corner my wheels bump over the messy repaired surface of a winding hill into three hairpin bends past a frieze of scarlet bougainvillea climbing widow Melinda's house, then down on renewed tarmac, gathering speed until the wheelie bin T-junction where I prop my bicycle on its stand to unload a black sack of weekly waste and the remains of a large broken plastic laundry bowl, then down again past greenery on either side to another short ascent. At the top I turn right on a narrow concrete track, corrugated, like turbulence on a plane, past a hoard of rubbish with glimpses of isolated houses and rich meadows of uncut grass and flowers, to another metalled road allowing me to join the main road to the north of the island via Skripero, Trompetta and Agros. 

*** *** ***

I'm working into my third reading of Mark Mazower's book on the Greek Revolution, as well as dipping into pages and chapters and the index. This is an incomplete, as Mazower admits, and contested history. 

Marietta Giannakou 1951-2022

In 2007, conservative New Democracy Party Education Minister Marietta Giannakou had to resign after approving a school text book on the revolution which mentioned that it was not just one side who'd committed atrocities during the struggle for independence. 

Prof Mazower's book describes truths that were once politically unacceptable in Greece. In 2021, Mazower was awarded an honorary Greek citizenship by a Conservative government for 'the promotion of Greece, its long history and culture to the international general public.' 

I asked a Greek friend recently "Do you call the events that brought about modern Greece 'The Greek War of Independence' or 'The Greek Revolution'?" 

Alex reflected for a moment on the direction of my query and answered, indisputably, "'The Greek Revolution' "

Mark Mazower titles his history 'The Greek Revolution', but unfolds a more equivocal account.  This comes much later, but it's clear that the allied Navies that defeated the Turks and the Egyptians at Navarino in 1827 would not have fought to save a 'revolution'. Mazower's book has managed to come, as near as a work of historical scholarship can, to being a 'cliff-hanger'. Of course, the Greeks were victorious. The Hellenic Republic exists. It's on the euro-currency! But reading Mazower's history I was wondering to his last chapter who was going to win. 

Insurrectionary talk was widespread across Europe in the 1820s. Rebellion against the old orders had been sparked by the American War of Independence; then the French Revolution and revolts across South America and the other parts of Europe.  Metternich and the Tsar had convened the Congress of Vienna - nearly wrecked by Napoleon's escape from Elba and his 100 days... 

Napoleon returns from Elba to disrupt the Congress of Vienna (George Cruikshank)

.

The Congress organised by Metternich was dominated by Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and Britain.

The Congress's agreement was signed just nine days before Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815. This magnificent gathering of 100s of conservative - some would say reactionary - monarchs, emperors and ministers welded an alliance designed to maintain the peace of the continent, suppress rebellion and share intelligence on all signs and symptoms of insurrection. This was not a good time for a revolution against the mighty Ottoman Empire. 

Prince Alexandros Ypsilanti

Yet the great Greek event - the 'Romeiko', the 'ethnogesea', began, in so far as there's a 'once upon a time', on 21st Feb 1821. 

Encouraged by a vastly distributed and secretive 'friendly' society founded in Odessa in 1814, full of commercial travellers on land and sea - the Filiki Etaireia - required oaths of loyalty, coded messages and secret signs on meeting a stranger.  Their black uniform, when they surfaced, bore the symbol of a skull and crossbones below a crucifix.  

Trade is a good cover for subversion; the language of commerce camouflaging the planning of revolt - price lists, inventories, consignments, cargoes, weights and measures, transactions, deadlines - protected by normal business discretion.  In 1820 the leaders of Filiki Etaireia asked Prince Alexander Ypsilanti to be their leader. Given the omens - not least the profound opposition of Ioannis Capodistria, to become first Prime Minister of Greece (more of him later), this aristocratic soldier was probably an excellent choice to start a dangerously impossible rebellion.

On 21st February this impulsive, bold, one-armed veteran of the war against Napoleon, falsely claiming the support of the Tzar, led a small and ragged force across the river Pruth from Russia into Ottoman Moldavia, far north of the land that would become Greece. Ypsilanti's expedition turned into a debacle of confusion and desertion, and, as others more cautious had warned, provoked bloody reprisals against Greeks from Sultan Mahmud II in Constantinople. The most prominent was the public hanging of the Ecumenical Patriarch, Gregory V, in front of The Saint Peter's Gate of the Patriarchate of Constantinople just after he'd celebrated Easter mass. 

Easter Sunday 22 April 1821 

With implicit approval of the Sultan, surrounding streets ran with the blood of Christian residents of the city. If this story were a Netflix series I'd end this first episode at this moment. The next episode would be about Greece in the early 19th century opening on a dramatic panorama of mountainous stone with glimpses of distant blue sea "Rumeli - mainland Greece 15 years earlier" and perhaps we'd open at the court of the rebel potentate Ali Pasha in Jannina. 

Audience chamber at the court of Ali Pasha in Jannina

St Christopher Άγιος Χριστόφορος: Γιατί απεικονίζεται με πρόσωπο σκύλου?

A shop on George Theotoki where we discussed the puzzle of a 'dog-headed' St Christopher

Linda and I were window gazing on the south side of George Theotoki Street in town. At a stationer with a stand outside the shop, a postcard of an icon caught my eye. It showed a saint with the head of a dog. Looking closely at it I saw that it was St Christopher, Αγιος Χριστόφορος, Christ-bearer. It was titles as from The Byzantine Museum in Athens - with no date, artist unknown. 

 Γιατί απεικονίζεται με πρόσωπο σκύλου?

Neither the shopkeeper, George nor Maria, the children's shoe shop next door, could explain it. Intrigued I asked at the Icon Gallery on the south side of Plakada t' Agioú of N. Theotoki. The man I spoke to - darn it, forgot to get his name - was familiar with this image. 

"It goes back to very old times, Egyptian" 

"Anubis" I thought

Anubis in the Book of the Dead - a guide to the journey from life to after-life used between 1550-50 BC

"The image was disapproved of by the Orthodox Church" he added "These icons only reappeared in the 17th century when the church became more tolerant. They can be seen in some of the older churches on the island from that time." 

Lin said "You can see this isn't a proper icon. Look at the feet and the head shown sideways." 

It turns out there's a wealth of information and conjecture about the dog-headed St Christopher. (Jim Pott's sends me this Greek link) I'm talking on the phone to my friend Simon Winters in London about another project, and our conversation turns to the strange icon. He'd not come across it. St Christopher is not mentioned in the bible. His story has been passed down through storytelling and tradition. I've noted his image since infancy on medals hung from the mirrors of bus and taxi drivers. How intriguing are such survivals through the ages. Our conversation turned to the mysterious centuries of Christianity before the faith became the one I learned at school - and that but one of so many varieties. 

The name of the shopkeeper where I saw the icon? 

"My name is Christopher"

*** *** ***

The St Christopher Chapel in the coach and car park of the Corfu Town Green Bus Terminal

In the coach park of the Green Bus terminal on the edge of Corfu town there's a chapel to St Christopher, patron saint of travellers. There' no similar chapel at the harbour where the ferries leave for the mainland and the ports of the Adriatic as far as Venice, nor is there so far as I know one at the airport, now managed by a German conglomerate, where contemporary politeness would have made a 'multi-faith room'. The Green bus station is quite new, replacing a friendlier fume-filled space near the sea at the foot of the town. The new terminal appeared in 2016. Richard Pine, who lives in Perithia, furthest village from the city on the north coast of Corfu, was vitriolic about the place - Ο Νέος Σταθμός...

The old Green Bus Station near the sea

Simon. I discovered to my alarm and despair that the bus station moved over the last weekend and one is now deposited in a no-man's-land near the airport. Too too shaming. RP

Dear R. Is that bus station move a permanent one? Coming into town, there must be a point you can get off earlier with a reasonable walk to the city centre. I hope so as I too rely on the bus. S

It has been planned for years - a real, modern, bus station - fully functional, devoid of humanity, androids serving coffee, miles from anywhere because planners do not take people into account. At present there is no stopping point between Lidl and the terminus but they will surely have to invent one, as it goes everywhere except where one needs to. Bring back the old one - at the Spilia - sez I…  

I’m trying to work out how you get from the new and inconvenient (except for airport tourists) Green bus terminus. No problem where it is for me. I just use my folding bicycle which stores in the luggage compartment. I suppose there’s a shuttle into town, but there might be a convenient stop closer to the city centre. It seems rough on the local people who have no interest in being close to the airport and want to get into town. If you find out anything vaguely positive let me know.  

…there is a shuttle but that is presumably not a long-term solution - the bus into town goes up the long hill past all those shops selling electronics etc, down the other side, out onto the roundabout by the 'other' Lidl and there you are. In the middle of no-mans-land. The return is even more stupid as it goes all round the world, including San Rocco, to come out exactly where it should have started from, but doesn't stop!

Walkers to the city centre making their way carefully from the new Green Bus Terminal

I have just been at the new Green Bus Station. It’s as miserable as you’ve observed. But the staff are proud of the place. I strolled in wheeling my little Brompton bike and was ordered out again. I folded it up and was forgiven. But at once two cleaners arrived to wipe the floor where my bicycle wheels, leaving no marks, had passed. I gather there’s a stop on the way out of town by the Old Port – Café Sette Vente - which may make things a little better, but as I cycled into town from the new station up that brief stretch of firmly divided dual carriageway - Ethniki Odos Lefkimis - I passed a single file of tourists negotiating the narrow rough path (I wouldn’t call it a pavement)... ...that runs up Dinatou Dimolitsa, leading to a longish stroll up Mitropolitou Methodiou into San Rocco Square. A mess! I admit the old bus station was probably not so good on health and safety with people and buses and diesel fumes mixing it in that little space, but it was agreeably located. Like most things people will get used to it, but I cannot say or think anything good about this non-place, its access so unfriendly to anyone on foot.  

Someone must have ensured this little church to St Christopher was included in the new building's plans, yet when I asked around this July no-one I asked upstairs in the office, nor at the enquiry desk knew anything about it or could answer my question about the superb icons being painted on its interior walls. The chapel is hardly larger than a wardrobe, perhaps an allotment shed - no stasidia nor lectern and the stand for candles, once lit, sits, on the pavement outside. 

My ebike outside the St Christopher chapel at Corfu's Green Bus Terminal

There's a collection box and case for beeswax candles inside. I'm used to myriad sizes of Greek churches from spacious cathedrals, the barn sized churches - all 36 of them - that are dotted around Ano Korakiana, attached in many cases to families, some locked and unused or even, like the distant Church of the Prophet Elias that marks our southern parish boundary ruined, but for a protective roof, to the small roadside Kandilakia marking the place of an accident - fatal and survived - and others that look similar but are markers reminding of a church some yards from the road. There are even shrines hardly larger than a sun dial or an elaborate garden bird feeder, with room for a small icon, and a candle, imitating the doors, windows, dome and cross of a larger church. 

So here they were. These finely painted works inside this little bus station chapel. Who was painting them? I dropped in on successive days over a fortnight - to admire their craftsmanship, hoping to catch the mysterious unknown icon painter at work. No luck. 

I remembered that a while ago my friend Mark had answered a question about a strange unfinished three floored house beside the road from Tzolou into Ano Korakiana whose ground floor has been incomplete these last 12 years at least. Two attractive terriers bark enthusiastically at me as I cycle by. I've not seen anyone there. 

"Who lives there, Mark?"

"An icon painter"

So returning from town I stopped my bicycle on the wild flowered verge before the house and called out.

<Χαίρετε>

A lady came to the balcony. She helped me - awkward in my 80th year - up flights of unbannisterd concrete stairs to the fine door of a studio. Over the next hour I learned she had painted the icons - and indeed, with her husband, many more all over Greece; that she had not yet been paid for the Green Bus contract; that I must not even think of intervening on her behalf - a typically unwise impulse of mine. Her name is Irene Vitouladitou. I felt honoured but also delighted at having begun to sate my curiosity.

I asked about the dog-headed St Christopher. 

"God knew he wanted to be a holy man. But Agios Christopher was a beautiful man. Women threw themselves at him. God in mercy gave him the head of a dog."

"I have heard and read many other explanations, but not that one. Did you make that up for me?"

A reference in a Greek Orthodox compendium: 

Thou who wast terrifying both in strength and in countenance ... didst surrender thyself willingly to them that sought thee; for thou didst persuade both them and the women that sought to arouse in thee the fire of lust, and they followed thee in the path of martyrdom...

The story I learned, perhaps at a Sunday school, in childhood: 

Hieronymus Bosch's 1490 painting of the legend replete with symbols

... a child asked Christopher to take him across the river. As they crossed the river the child grew heavier and heavier so that Christopher could hardly hold him up. Struggling to the other side, Christopher said to the child: "You put me in danger. The whole world could not have been as heavy on my shoulders as you were." The child replied: "You had on your shoulders not only the whole world but Him who made it. I am Christ your king, whom you are serving by this work." The child vanished 

Irene Vitouladitou's unfinished work in the St Christopher Chapel at the Green Bus Terminus in Corfu