Όλοι μαζί

Easter celebrations recede. Four days of sunny weather, are followed by rain pattering down since before midnight. I light the stove, to stay warm as I dress after a shower. The sky's clearing, light grey to sepia over the mainland, the sea striped silver by narrow rays of light. Lin, a quarter awake, tucks herself deeper in the bedclothes. I creak and stretch, the stove clicks and hums.

Most of yesterday was spent eating, drinking and chatting in Effie and Adoni’s garden across the path between our houses. More than a score of friends and relatives came and went  - from far Crete, the Mani Μάνη at the end of Taygetos, from bustling Athens and Thessaloniki - as well as locals including Lefteri, whose home this Easter is full to the brim with family. There was village wine in pop bottles, green salads, tzadziki, cheeses, different meats from the barbeque, beef, lamb, liver, bread, pasta and mince, macaroni and later cakes that made mere sugar want to give up and go home. Especially delicious was a dish made of oranges, somewhere between a cake and a pie. Music played, some danced and – for goodness sake – plates and tiles were smashed and we laughed a lot.

Effie and Adonis

Beforehand, just after eleven on Monday, Lin and I had joined the circuit of the village led by raised banners, the choir, the full village band playing happy tunes, and no longer the epitafio but another hand-born platform showing Christ soaring from the tomb, guards with shields and weapons hurled away astonished and blinded by the force of the light around him.

At Paul and Cinty’s we stopped for tea as the procession continued down Democracy Street.

Mark asks us to tea at Paul and Cinty's

The day before that, as Saturday switched to Sunday, we heard the distant boom of fireworks in the city on the horizon, the closer detonations in the black above in Sokraki, before our village erupted with fireworks and gunshots to announce the Resurrection, Anastasis, Ανάστασις.
“Cinty and me were in town” said Paul to me later “We watched fireworks going up from villages all along the mountains.”
<Όλοι μαζί> “All together” cried the Pappas from the stage, all lit up <Χριστός ανέστη!> “Christ is risen” Dad first taught me when I joined the Easter celebration in Athens – in a crowd of many thousands in 1957 – that the proper reply is <Αλήθος ανέστη!> “Arisen indeed!”

Waiting for the Anastasis in Ano Korakiana

** **
A little earlier we’d queued for a flame for our candles outside the rood screen in Ag. Georgious, surrounded by golden illustrations disappearing into the dark of the high roof, hidden by a hundred lights on the church’s grand chandelier. We nursed the candles home to sketch a fourth cross on the lintel. In the crowd there is the transformation of faces from watching and thinking to a wreaths of smiles as people recognize and stroll over to greet friends and relatives, and sometimes to extend a greeting to strangers. This year our pool of familiar faces has increased. People we feel we know, others we see a lot but who through our shyness or theirs, exchange tentative nods and others who will stand and walk close, who we pass every day but don’t quite know how or if to contact. We were saying more ‘Chronia Pollas’ ‘Kalo Paschas’ and replying <Αλήθος ανέστη!>. This year we met Stephi and Wesley who have a studio up a canton near the bandstand. Wesley confided that some years ago there’d been a meeting to debate whether the village should have a taverna, maybe two, and attract more visitors. “80% voted that they’d like to leave their village as it is” “But that doesn’t mean they don't welcome strangers, I’m sure” I said <Όχι, Αλήθος> “No indeed” My feelings for Ano Korakiana are such that I can not speak them without getting such a lump of joy in my throat that I embarrass myself let alone others.
** **

Όλοι μαζί

On Sunday, lamb roast at Mark and Sally’s, the spit on the edge of their broad foyer - where a pair of swallows have returned to nest within inches of our heads - the party on their balcony under a sprouting vine, overlooking, so it seems, all Corfu south of the mountains behind us. We were British or Australian and so I, of course, talk a lot, no longer, subdued by my barbarian ignorance in Greek company.
“But” Sally, who does speak Greek, said kindly to my great pleasure “I can sense you getting more confident with the words, Simon.” It's not her style to say things just to be nice.
I guess conversations across languages always start with a growing body of nouns; monosyllabic chat supported by gestures, and go on from there, we hope.

We began eating around midday and watched the sunset. In between we’d fired shotguns in the air, eaten spitted lamb, sausages and kokoretsi, cracked each others' red-dyed hard-boiled eggs as in conkers, exchanged kronia pollas <Χρόνια πολλά!> and kalo pascas <Κάλο Πάσχα>, kissed hullo and goodbye on both cheeks, embracing. Is this gradual assimilation?

** ** **
My greatgrandmother, Lucy Halkett, who encouraged me to call her what I’d called her from my cot – Gaga - once muttered incomprehensibly “we thought Oscar was a fool taking on Queensbury” and “I was with Edmund Gosse in Trafalgar Square on election night – every time a seat went to the Liberals up went a red rocket, to the Tories, a blue” and “We were in a hotel in Kristiania and I saw Ibsen, through a window, combing his leonine locks” “Who, Gaga?” “I asked him to sign my copy of Hedda Gabler, which he did.” Aged three or four I’d climb into her bed at her cottage in Itchen Abbas, a few feet down a green carpeted landing from my nursery in which hung a print of Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earring and, over my bed, a watercolour of a sunny view of the sea, a small distant steamer, a brush smudge, coasting between me and a low stretch of east coast. Tucked in beside her she’d read me fairy stories and legends about the Minotaur, the Golden Fleece, about Baucis and – what was the other’s name? – and the drowned village, about Robin Hood and King Arthur, and Pooh Bear (the only one that bored me even then) and telling me about the seascape reading me Masefield’s poem Cargoes with its quinquireme of Nineveh and a dirty tramp steamer with salt-caked smokestack carrying Tyne coal, road-rails, pig-lead, firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays, so that painlessly and cosy, leaning on her downy pillows I learned to read. She also taught me about looking after a book; “never turn down a page to keep your place; never turn back the spines on themselves; never write in a book.”

I’ve been disobedient, liking paperbacks I can read them on beaches, stain with messy fingers from a picnic, annotate, fold the tip of a page to mark my place, the bottom to mark a passage I’d like to find again, a good while later – like Mistress Quickly describing Falstaff’s death in Henry V

…and went away, an it had been any christom child; ‘a parted even just between twelve and one, e’en at turning of the tide; for after I saw him fumble with sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his fingers’ ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and ‘a babbled of green fields….

or the passage around page 582 (I invent) in War and Peace where Tolstoy describes the unknowable confusion of a battle compared to the ordered narratives of its historians.

This book we’ve been lent by Cinty and Paul is, as Lin says, a mite ‘unwieldy’. It needs to be treated with the respect I’ve almost forgotten, approached cap in hand as one might approach the places it describes – in their heyday. It has a map insert of Corfu which shows the name of the two rocks, that - from the Old Port - look like one (on the horizon just to the left of the bollard on this image), sprouting from the sea 400 metres off the western tip of Vido island. On a modern chart they’re Nausika Rocks – βράχα. On the Venetian map, they’re shown as one islet, with the name Condillonisi – νησί=island. Paul, Cinty’s husband, told me the other night “We call it Punk Rock”. 

Inside the back and front covers of the book, on cream vellum is an engraved seascape of the Porto Spilea, in the lea of the old Citadel. A paddle steamer ploughs towards the port past the becalmed sailboats.

This suggests mid-19th century, near the end of the British Protectorate, and therefore harbinger of the decline of the islands dominant class – the signorini - with whom, by and large, the British – excepting Lord Nugent, Stewart-Mackenzie and especially Lord Seaton, had tended to find common cause if seldom common sympathy. Noble houses of Corfu (Παϊσίδου Δέσποινα, 1997, Στ' αρχοντικά της Κέρκυρας, Θεσσαλονίκη ) was published a year after the death of its author, Despina Paisidou, in 1996.
Her project, begun in the late 70s, continued into the 80s as she absorbed the atmosphere of over twenty houses, some in Corfu town, others in the countryside around; houses and the remnants of estates in the same families for generations – the noble houses of Corfu that you seldom see, in part because they are being absorbed by vegetation, in part because they were so finely designed they do not assail the eye like the graceless constructions of the modern Lopachkins, destroyers of the world’s cherry orchards. In 1992 Paisidou started working with the photographer Chrysa Nikoleri to obtain the photographs for the book. It is competently but artlessly translated into English by Christopher Markham, making the Greek prose sound awkward – which I’m sure it’s not - spelling the name of the first Lord High Commissioner ‘Mateland’, along with a number of simple mispellings that should have been picked up by an Anglophone proofer and using English versions of Greek place names that frequently make them almost unfindable - which might be no bad thing. Unlike another somewhat self-congratulatory ‘coffee table’ book full of advantageous photos of Corfu that I looked through last year and called ‘landscape-porn’ this is quite a different work. Paisidou grew up and was educated in Thessaloniki, studied journalism in the US, art history at Stanford, and continued her education in Perugia and Teheran, becoming a successful journalist in national press, radio and television, and of course, working in happy partnership with her talented photographer also from Thessaloniki.

In the noble house of Jan and Augustus Sordinas (photos: Chrysa Nikoleri)

Augustus Sordinos, one of the prefacing academics persuaded to both write an introduction as well as inviting Nikoleris and Paisidou to view the remains of his baronial home with its church, crypt, olive presses, outbuildings and outlying estate, gives an eloquent testimony to a book that witnesses the folk-museums of a decaying class - a collective of landlords who inherited and maintained their power through shrewd collusion with the Venetian empire, preserved it through similar arrangements with their highly temporary successors, the post-Napoleonic French and the British. Their gift to posterity, made even clearer by this diplomatically created work, was a poisoned chalice – but for those fine exceptions where character surpassed class. The income of the signorini derived from their land and the wage slavery of those who worked it for them. Progressive legislation such as the 1912 Land Act granting ownership of much of that land to those who cultivated it, the selling off of ‘family silver’, the fragmentation of land through dowries and bequests, and much later the higher wages of tourism, signalled the decay of the estates through loss of scale and cheap labour. One legacy of the noble estates lies in the parlous state of agriculture, a once-intensive olive harvest that lit the lamps of the Venetian empire – a specific problem of scale Corfu shares with mono-crop islands across the world; another most positive, added to by this book, is or ought to be, the exemplary architecture and construction, interior joinery, flooring and plastering, not of palaces or castles, but of moderate sized town and country houses. The book – with its photographs of exteriors patina-ed by age, flaked paint and chipped stucco, wreathed in the coils of unpruned creepers, finely proportioned rooms, mottled with damp, rich dark woodwork, tiled passages, stained glass, elegantly moulded coving and skirting, full of the exquisite spoils of class exploitation - fills a missing piece in my understanding of the present economy and the driving passion of the Ionian rizospastai, the radicals from Corfu, Levkas, Cephalonia and the unionists from Zakinthos who campaigned to end the emptying of signorini chamber pots and the humiliation of rouveli pie – a tale in the book also told us by Lula describing estate workers ordered to make a pie of Robins (were they κοκκινολαιμόπιτα?) over the weekend to prevent them using spare time to assemble. Once it was delivered, she said, the Master had it thrown away.

Prof Sordinas introduces Noble Houses of Corfu

I would like to see this essay in Greek; submit it to a translator who would honour Sordinas' passion, scholarship and decency.
***

The service for Good Friday began at Ag. Georgios at 8.00pm. We stood in the well of the church in the shadow. Not understanding the words of the prayers nor the hymns I had less occasion to think about them, only able to look and listen. Candlelight in a high building embroidered with gilt and silver makes faces as serene as icons, especially where there are long curving eyebrows in the flickering light of tapers. Above, in the choir of the church, profiles seen from below, take on the foreshortening grandeur of set-piece Italian paintings. High on the ceiling astride a galloping white horse, his eyes half shut as he concentrates on his target, Saint George, more visible for the darkness in the church, charges to the rescue, tilting at the evil one. The informal clothes that most of us wear - even for special events - fade into the dark, turning us into timeless silhouettes, while by the rood screen our priest and his helpers move between light and shade.
After the first service Lin and I walked out into the crowded yard of the church under stars, through the gate and down a short road to Democracy Street where we followed well behind the band, the choir, couched banners, and the epitaphio - Christ's tomb - carried by four laymen, festooned with carnations and lilies, fitted with electric candles. So the procession marched swaying gently through the narrow street a hundred metres to the small church of Saint Spiridon, opposite the lady who grows a host of pelargonium and geraniums along the front of her house and who sings in the choir. More prayers and a hymn, then we paraded a kilometre, past our house again, and up through the wooded darkness over the bridge, seeing the lights of the village through the tall cypress’, on through the narrows of Venetia, where we got to peer inside houses as people greeted one another at doorways ‘Chronia polla’ “Chronia polla’. We saw Katya Spingos, with her daughter Melina, home from study in Mytilini, who asked how we were when we met on the way
“I’m happy” I said “well no not too happy tonight”
“No of course” she smiled, but she was right that in a way despite the lamenting notes and solemn taps of the band, I was too happy for Good Friday.
Back from Venetia after eleven, trailed by several impatient cars down from Sokraki, who expected our village to observe the notice that Democracy Street would re-open on the hour, the procession returned to Ag. Georgios where, after more prayers, we could gather around the epitafio and help ourselves to red carnations to take home.
As we passed their home on the corner we met Cinty and Paul.
 “The little brindle cat died this morning before dawn and I’ve buried her in the garden” I told them, having asked Cinty the night before if there was any hope for the little creature. Bubble we called her, her brother Squeak having disappeared a week after we gave both cats names. She succumbed to a stroke two days ago and lay near our door, miaowing unable to get to her feet. She’d been an outside-the-house companion since we came to the village in 2007 – one of the rare cats not fearful of being stroked.
“Four years is quite good for a Corfu cat” said Cinta
“We’ve a few of her surviving children wandering about now” I said.

Chalky, Double, Bubble and Ginger

** ** **
Generosity, gifts and help; mostly unsought. Vasiliki brought round two long cheesepies sprinkled with sesame, hot from the oven.

I was visiting Mark and Sally and in the alley down to their house noticed an open door to a shaded wine store with a large wooden barrel and ranks of fat glass bottles. A woman came over to me as I peeked in at this array.
“Hullo. You don’t know me but I know you.” It was Katerina, a friend of Katya and Thanassis, married to a carpenter, Alexander, whose skills include being able to make and mend wooden barrels. His joinery is below the village. The local filler material for mending barrel staves is papyrus reed. “I know how much you love the village”
“That’s true” She gave me a two litre bottle of their wine, from local grapes from vines at the western edge of the village. There I presume the summer heat had not, as in Lefteris’ garden, dessicated the fruit on the vine, so that, for last year’s vintage, he’d needed to buy Zakinthos grapes sold by the road in Corfu during September.

"I hate plastic"

We discussed the economy. Hard times we agreed, “but it may throw us back on skills and attitudes we’ve been abandoning. I’m impressed at your wine making and barrel-making"
“But few can pay the cost of my husband’s work. I hate plastic”
“Me too…but it’s so convenient and cheap” but, I thought, for the cost of collateral damage in indestructible detritus from pole to pole.
All the time we’ve been here, Mark and Sally, have done us services – checked and paid local bills for power and water in our absence, taken greeting cards to our neighbours, checked the house. To Mark I mentioned that my angle grinder - itself a local gift added gratis to a purchase of a double bed a couple of years ago – had stopped. He brought me another, with speed control, adding a small square of marine ply we needed to back the bottom half of one of our doors. An 8’ x 4’ sheet of this costs €60 from Simoneti in town.
At a table-top sale in Dassia we met Maya. I’d not heeded her peering over my shoulder while I browsed second-hand books, buying a scuffed paperback of Zola’s Earth, that she’d already picked up and put down. Later we came to her clothing stall. Lin spied a jacket that fitted me.
“This was my father’s. He died only three years ago. This is my sister Rose. We’re Dutch and German, from Haarlem” speaking Greek and living here much of the year, though with commitments in the Netherlands -drop-in refuge where young people at a loss to make a life can stay for a while, be trained; get a better chance. As we chatted she piled up more of her dad’s clothes – jeans, shirts, vests – and insisted - “because we enjoy the same reading, please have them all"
I said “Can I take your picture?”
“It sounds paranoid. Mention me on the internet, but don’t post any picture of me. I’m an atheist and a free-thinker. In my country there are dangerous idiots who think they’ll go to paradise if they punish a woman for speaking her mind.”
******

Corfu green continues to spread – from our balcony railings, to the side door, the cupboard door beside, the shutters on the small window, a length of gutter for the apothiki and its doors, both garden gates and the garden fence. Lin paints.

I do smaller jobs like getting the small door inside the porch to hang properly, sanding down the old shutters to go in the bedroom window, taking out the wood and reinserting sanded and carefully screwed down, making and inserting end pieces cut from a tin sheet for the repainted gutter…Katerina and Nectarina, her little sister scamper about. We practice Greek and English on each other. Katerina decided as a numbers exercise to see how many clothes pegs she can attach to her head. I also had a chance to correct her tendency, when picking flowers, to make no distinction between wild and garden flowers, owned and unowned, a difference that would have interested Lévi-Strauss. On a walk round the village Katerina was picking a small bunch of flowers to give Lin, when we saw her run to a garden fence and reach through to pick a geranium head. "Oxi Katerina, Yia to dromo endaxi. Yia to kipos den einai endaxi!" "Katalaveno" she said to my astonishment.

Clothespeg goblin at the door

** ** **
From Ana-Digest today:

A crucial week for the Greek economy begins on Tuesday, as the Middle-term programme and the package of privatisations must be itemized for tabling in parliament by mid-May and vote by early June after deliberations with the EU-IMF 'troika'. Prime minister George Papandreou returns to Athens on Monday from a brief Easter holiday respite on the island of Hydra. A team of the EU-IMF troika experts is due in early May for its regular consultations and evaluation of progress ahead of the disbursement of the next tranche (€12 billion) of the EU-IMF €110 billion bailout loan to Greece. Eurostat, the European Commission's statistical agency, is also due to release on Tuesday the figures for the 2010 deficit.

'...instead of freedom'

In 30 days instead of the feared 90 days my free digitised copy of Eleni Calligas' 1994 thesis The Rizospastai (Radical-Unionists): Politics and nationalism in the British Protectorate of the lonian Islands, 1815-1864 has been successfully downloaded to my laptop. There have been delays about which I've grumbled but that's because the EThOS digitised thesis service has been more popular than expected.

What a wealth of evidence and analysis I can now take to the island to read at leisure - Calligas' scholarly account of an epic struggle between politics and nationalism, of an escape from the Protectorate that, in the passionate words of the leading rizospastai, Ilias Zervos of Cephalonia, had:

...substituted rather than fulfilled popular rights and, in the guise of revolution (bred those who) want only the removal of their opponents from power and the substitution in their place of either the instigators or others chosen by their obscure promoters...

... 'instead of freedom', the mother country had given the Septinsular the pollutant of political corruption...

which has brought this miserable nation to its present deterioration and produced as many unscrupulous exploiters as a decaying corpse produces worms.

Calligas concludes 'The immense bitterness of this diagnosis stemmed from the conviction that lonian radicalism had contained in its doctrines and practices a life-giving alternative.'

* * *

I picked a bag of damsons from the garden for Lin to take to her mother to make jam this morning. An email came from Mark:

Hi Simon , just looking to see when you arrive and I believe it is on Tuesday the 25th .... Martin and Angie and young Theo are here (their last night) so it would be nice for us all to get together if you land early and not late that is, anyway let us know. Mark

We go to Greece with uncertaintly about the future of inlogov, (my dream) my link with the university, the opening of plots on the VJA, the economy...Time for:

"You are old, father William," the young man said, "And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

Meanwhile my 'order book' contains a number of seminars on scrutiny including one for States of Jersey, a joint Oversight and Scrutiny two days with Andrew in London the moment I get back from Greece, the Japan Programme over October, the Australian tour with John Martin in November and a likely post graduate module early next year, with various other enquiries for work and an ESRC Small Grants bid with Jonathan Davies.

* * *

Well well...how nice... I've just learned in a chat on Liana's Corfu blog that the family, headed by Vasilis, who run the olive oil processing factory at the foot of the village also make iron gates and balconies. We've grown increasingly keen to find a way (including the cash) to replace the outside stairs to a balcony that the previous owners' builder so fecklessly removed from 208 Democracy Street as part of the ill-judged improvements we've gradually been making good.

Young Mrs T, over a Greek coffee in their sitting room, mentioned the vexed loss of our side balcony (μπαλκόνι). I asked her the word for ‘stupidity’ – ‘vlahas’ “βλάκας” – and repeated the word with appropriate gestures. “I promise it will be restored” I said, rubbing my finger and thumb with the need-for-money gesture. (I’m determined we should do this). We exchanged animated gestures of astonishment at human folly, muttering “βλάκας” again. “Why take it away?” “Akrivos. Yiati?” I replied (“Ακριβώς. Υιατί;”) “βλάκας” we agreed. “Balcony!” she gestured gently “You say ‘Calimera’ to the street!” Talking about this to Lin, explaining to Annie, how the English builder for the previous English owners had built on the large wooden balcony overlooking a panorama we love, but, in the process, removed the stairs on the side of the house leading to first floor french windows and a smaller balcony that overlooked Democracy Street, the neighbours and the path below - substituting private space for what had been public; especially as, until Lin replanned the upstairs room, the new wooden balcony could only be entered from a bedroom. “We must get a plan and an estimate” I said “I’ll ask around – possibly Thanassis S or Kostas A – might know of a photo from Ano Korakiana archives. There are quite a few old photos on the village website…but this all happened so recently. Hm. I’ll see if Mr Leftheris can do a sketch from memory.” (22 April 2009)

When the wind blows: smoke from fires in northern Athens seen over Lycabettus in the city centre

** ** ** Historical research helps create a more complicated idea of Greece. Two newish books about seeing and inventing Greece David Wills' The Mirror of Antiquity: 20th Century British Travellers in Greece and The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797–1896) edited by Roderick Beaton, meanwhile I'm enjoying a detective story - The Messenger of Athens by Anne Zouroudi whose hero Hermes Diaktoros, has a moniker - 'the fatman'. He buys a box of matches, empties out the matches and replaces them with a cockroach. I've at last found a Greek detective to add to my set of fictional policemen from different countries, Salvo Montalbano, Aurelio Zen, Franco Brunetti, Kurt Wallander, Bernie Gunther, Shunsuke Honma, Jules Maigret, Irene Huss...

* * *

Regarding the Victoria Jubilee Allotments, Adrian Goldberg at The Stirrer has featured the latest situation. My friend, John Tyrrell, after hearing the news of the indefinite postponement of the S106A on the the VJA passed this to the City Council Cabinet member for Leisure Sport and Culture, Councillor Martin Mullaney, whose portfolio includes allotments. John tells me that Martin's meeting with officers in the morning "to get to the bottom of this." I've sent a briefing email:

Dear Cllr Mullaney

I make regular use of your 'graffiti' youtube to show what can be achieved, but that's not why I'm writing.

On the subject of the Victoria Jubilee Allotments (VJA) and the postponed S106A conditions which John Tyrrell has drawn to your attention, I'm sure your officers will inform you of this, but it may be helpful to read this from the minutes of a Lozells and East Handsworth Ward meeting on 28 July 2004 – a month after the application - N/01514/03/FUL - to build on the VJA subject to the S106A was approved. I was the ‘member of the public’ who asked for assurances of this matter being monitored.

Extract from Minutes of July 2004:

D. Planning Application No. N/01514/03/FUL – Victoria Jubilee Allotments

A member of the public drew the Committee’s attention to the fact that the planning application for the Victoria Jubilee Allotments had been deferred so that a Section 106 agreement could be signed to provide the following:-

• Eighty new municipal allotments plus an index linked payment of £21,000 towards their maintenance.

• An index link sum of £27,000 towards the maintenance of a play area and another £25,000 in lieu of a second play area.

• An index link sum of £15,000 towards the regeneration of neighbouring Handsworth Park.

• Two playing pitches and a cricket square plus a pavilion and car parking to the Council design.

• The inclusion of twenty four affordable homes.

The member of the public requested the Committee’s support and commitment to ensuring those conditions were honoured and that the Ward would closely monitor progress on those negotiations. The Chairperson indicated that the local Councillors had been supportive of the proposals and the relevant Planning Officer would be able to advise on the current situation. (Extract ends)

Over the years we've not been well informed. New conditions kept emerging as excuses for delay such as the notorious 'trigger' point decreeing no work could proceed on the S106A until a certain proportion of houses had been been sold. I'm not suggesting that's not normal but why was the ward committee and the public not informed? It had been extraordinarily difficult for us, but also our solicitor, Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, to extract information we were legally entitled to receive from the City Planning Department, consistent with the verbal assurances we had been given about being kept informed of progress. As a result we have been subject to a continued series of raised hopes followed by news of further delays of which the latest is the most depressing - given the prolonged campaign that we conducted for nearly 10 year's prior to the application's approval to save the whole site from being built over - a campaign that took us right up to our barrister's assessment of the prospect of judicial review of a planning decision defined as unsatisfactory but in the last resort legally unassailable. It was a close run thing - with the approval won by one vote in committee in May 2004.

Yours sincerely

Simon Baddeley

Handsworth Allotments Information Group (HAIG)

What must be renewed

Work and things

Phew! Milton Keynes, Liverpool with Charlie, Oxfordshire, Cumbria and the campus based programme on Oversight and Scrutiny with Andrew, papers from which I'm moderating today. I've had a busy few weeks, plus planning for Australia in the winter and the Japan Programme in October against the background rumble of organisation change at the university and the summer lull of government. My webpage at Inlogov has been rewritten by Nathan Johnson to make it easier for anyone interested to download some of my writing and view some of the film clips that support it. As my hair gets whiter it was a good idea to put a newer picture of myself on the site - one Richard took as we ate a meal in town last week.

I've looked over at the VJA site from Handsworth Park.

Something's going on but Rachel and I can't see the site being ready by early August.

[25 July 09: I finally got through to Adrian Stagg at Allotments in the City (0121 303 3038 adrian.stagg@birmingham.gov.uk). He said "We're very disappointed. The plots will not be ready by Allotments Week, 10-16 August, and we don't know when they will be. We are on the case. We're on to the developer. I'm preparing another Newsletter to share this news, in the meantime sit on your hands. We're as vexed as you and the other shortlisted plotholders. We'll keep you informed. This is going to happen, Simon!]

I top up the compost, make tea and coffee, feed the fish and give nuts and fat balls to the birds, talk on the phone, email and skype. It rains. And rains. At the market last week: "Have you got fat balls?" "I haven't but .... (Ha!)" Lin's being reproaching me for doing so little work on the house - painting damp spots, filling cracks in ceilings and walls, tidying, washing, folding, stacking, storing, recycling and disposing, managing her properties, viewing another, helping Amy move into her new home with Guy. Now and then on a station platform, in the garden, cycling slowly through a crowd, gazing over water, a piercing ray of love. Always my thoughts leap to the Highlands, to the village and the view over to fair Greece. Of course my learning about 19th century Ionian history continues with connections to contemporary events and attitudes. I long to get a full copy of Calligas' thesis so I can get really engrossed in her detailed research on the Rizospastai - a chance to see the Protectorate through Ionian eyes. I would like to see how the differing characters of successive High Commissioners created different patterns of action and reaction in the populations of the islands. Maitland's dishonourable petty xenophobia makes me ponder violence even today. Adam's decency and courage warms me to the Protectorate...and so on.

Epirus and the Sea of Corfu from Ano Korakiana

Work and play - learning about the Rizospastai

Keith Kelly, Research and Publications, Yoko Miyamoto, Assistant Director and Noboro Fujishima, Director of the Japan Local Government Centre in London at the Bullring. They came as our guests to Birmingham, to get a glimpse of our city's regeneration from Jon Bloomfield, Head of European Policy at Advantage West Midlands, 10 years Head of Re

gional, European and International Division at Birmingham City Council.

After two hours walking and talking round the centre, we had lunch at Bank Restaurant, then taxi'd to Edgbaston campus so they could see where we run their October programme for young local government managers from Japan - an event I've run for over a decade.

The recession is eating into the momentum of regeneration. Not dramatically, not obviously. The effect is in the small indicators. Decreasing business start-ups, abandoned leases of commercial premises, to let and for sale signs, construction work slowed or stopped, fewer and fewer tenancies of city centre residences being taken up and others abandoned. It's too quiet.

* * *

On Wednesday I was in Cumbria - there and back overnight - to animate a session on new ways of doing scrutiny. Then on Thursday I started to meet the Ionians involved in opposing the British presence in the islands through finally starting to read Eleni Calligas' dissertation The `Rizospastai': politics and nationalism in the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands 1815-1864. After the British Library told me they had no idea when the thesis would be on-line, Calligas' doctoral supervisor pointed me to the Institute for Historical Research. "There may be a copy there." It's right below the tall Senate House of London University and I was there by 9.30. The librarian bought me the dissertation. I started reading. I ran through references, scanned the chapter list, began to get a feel for how the thesis had been put together.

So far I've been studying this story from the British perspective. Now I discover figures - vital to the radical movements that developed and diverged in the Ionian islands in the years leading up to the end of the British Protectorate - roughly 1840s to 1860s. Up until now the Rizospastai* have been a clamour in the wings of an English theatre. Now, thanks to Calligas, another dimension of Ionian history begins to emerge - especially the important part played by political activity on the other Ionian Islands; Zakinthos [Ζάκυνθος, Zante] and Cephalonia [Kefallonia, Κεφαλλονιά, Kefalonia, Cephalonia, Kefallinia] in particular.

Ilias Zervos lakovatos (1814-1894), editor of Fileleftheros, leading Rizospastai

Calligas' thesis is that Zervos, from Cephalonia, was a radical who wanted to end the Protectorate so that the Ionian Islands - Ιονίων Νησιών - could become an independent self-governing republic. After British reforms and imprisonment and exile had temporarily silenced Zervos and his companions, another radical - Constantinos Lombardos [Κωνσταντίνος Λομβάρδος] - from a different Ionian island, Zante, emerged. Lombardos campaigned vigorously for the end of Protectorate in the name of union with the Greek Kingdom.

Constantinos Lombardos 1820-1888

As enosis approached, Zervos and his fellow radicals, free again, found themselves in the anomalous position of appearing to oppose it, when in fact what they wanted was to ensure that the terms of the union would affirm their radical principals. What they feared was that the British would cede the Ionian islands to the Greek Kingdom without setting conditions for the realisation of those principals. Lombardos was more pragmatic, less of an intellectual. For him and his followers enosis was an end in itself. Lombardos and Zervos were both radicals but they were very different personalities.

Iosif Momferratos, [Ιωσήφ Μομφεράτος] 1816-1888, Risozpastai from Cefallonia, editor of Anagenissis

I've enjoyed finding pictures of Lombardos, Zervos and Joseph Momferratos. Other names are Gerasimos Livadas, George Typaldos, Typaldos Pretenteris, Ioannis Menagias, Frankiskos Pylarinos, Stamatelos Pylarinos...

*disambiguation: Rizopastis - Ριζοσπάστης - is the name given to the official newspaper, started in 1916, of today's Greek Communist Party

*** ***

I was pondering recent remarks made by a celebrity arguing that, unlike democracies, dictators "get things done!" Hm? I suppose dictators are more efficient at ensuring, through fear and enchantment, that their subjectivity is accepted as objective - a phenomenon captured long ago by Hans Anderson's tale of shared delusion, The Emperor's New Clothes. So called 'strong leaders' can reduce a messy plurality of opinion to a party line. They're efficiency is in suppressing evidence of inefficiency. In a democracy you can try and find your way to something approximating truth via many lies, spins and half-truths, in a dictatorship there is one truth, and that is not a truthful way to understand the world. How can you debate the difference between democracy and fascism? A paragraph from the first page of 'The Conflict of Fascist and Democratic Ideals' by Melvin Rader in The Antioch Review, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1943, p. 246:

I suspect it's an impossible argument. If Hitler had been efficient he wouldn't have forced the inventor of atomic power to join the other side.

** ** **

The TV has been showing the procession of hearses bearing the flag draped coffins of young British soldiers coming home to Brize Norton from Afghanistan. The country appears to be divided on whether or not we should be fighting this war in Afghanistan. I feel that Bush and Blair weakened our moral standing as well as time and lives with their ill-planned duplicitously justified invasion of Iraq, when we should have been putting all our energies into fighting a war in Afghanistan.

Anyone doubting the international connection might watch this video about the refugees camped in Patras or read the story in Kathimerini 14th July '09 by Pantelis Boukalas: In a book called Musaferat, or The Thousand and One Nights of a Refugee Camp. Patra-based lawyer and author Vassilis Ladas comments that:

a city needs to have its rubbish swept away, not fellow human beings...the camp in Patra in which our fellow humans reside is inhuman and its brutal "cleanup" cannot mask the huge responsibility that the government and local authorities shoulder to serve humanity and the basic responsibilities that are binding on them by virtue of European and international agreements....'

These passages from Ladas' book were featured in newspapers in Patra on January 31, 2008; signed by seven writers who live in the city who sensed the onset of events...

End of the British Protectorate of the Ionian

From: Simon Baddeley Sent: 10 January 2008 To: humanities-enquiries@bl.uk Subject: A petition from Ano Korakiana, Corfu re the ending of the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands and the Treaty of London 1864.

Dear Humanities, British Library. It has been suggested at your phone enquiry desk that I should try e-mailing to you. As a local historian I have been sent this e-mail request from the village of Ano Korakiana, Corfu, Greece.

Dear Simon. It is said that before the Union of the Ionian Islands with Greece (1864), inhabitants of Ano Korakiana signed a "paper" that they asked for the British Government to remain the islands under the Britain. We have been looking for this paper for years at the Greek archives without result. We wonder if you can help us by searching this paper in British archives (Parliament, Colonies archives, Foreign Office etc). We are sure that one of the names that signed the paper is Panos, Panayiotis or Panagiotis Metallinos (Μετταλινος). He was the 'leader'. A similar paper has been signed by inhabitants of Kinopiastes (another village in Corfu) and one village in Zakynthos island. It is passed by word of mouth, and today's information from my family's environment: a well known person that searched for another theme, found it in Leeds University (history section?) at the end of 1970s, a file about the Ionian aspect that contained this 'paper'. She read it, but they didn't let her have a copy. A further source is a 'historical and more novel' book, written by a Corfiot author named Spiros Katsaros. It is supported in this book - Helio's Story - that the petition was given to High Commissioner named Sir Henry Storks (1859-1864) and he attached it behind a report to the British Parliament. According to Katsaros, this theme was published to the national media (newspapers) of that period. Thank you in advance. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Best wishes. Thanassis Spiggos and Kostas Apergis

Making further enquiries I received the following e-mail from Prof. Holger Afflerbach, Lecturer in Twentieth Century European History at Leeds University:

Simon. It seems to be true: there were some Greek inhabitants on the islands who wanted to remain under British domination (like Gibraltar today: not very astonishing, indeed). I asked a friend of mine, who is a retired professor of International history, if he recalls this thesis in Leeds. He didn't, but he recalls that there was a thesis in Birkbeck College in the early 1960s on this topic. His advise was to look in the list of the Institute of Historical Research. I think it would also be possible to contact the British Library. They should have a copy of the thesis. It would also be possible to contact Birkbeck College. Unfortunately this friend of mine did not remember the author of the thesis or the exact title. I hope that these few informations help you further. Good luck and best wishes. Holger Afflerbach.

Since then I have not yet traced the Birkbeck thesis though I am trying to contact Dr Eleni Calligas who is now, I believe, at the British School in Athens. Dr Calligas is an expert on divisions within local Ionian politics in the later 19th century. Her 1994 LSE or University of London thesis - Rizopastai: Radical Unionists and Political Nationalists - covers the same critical period of Ionian politics when the Ano Korakiana and other petitions (if that is what they were) may have been delivered. I have also ordered The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean 1850-1960 by Robert Holland and Diana Markides, which has a detailed chapter on the end of the Ionian Protectorate and includes Eleni Calligas as a reference. I wonder if you can give me further guidance on where I might find the Birkbeck thesis mentioned or any other source that you might consider relevant. Yours sincerely. Simon Baddeley From: Humanities Reference Service, The British Library, St Pancras, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB http://www.bl.uk/ Tel: +44 (0)20 7412 7676 humanities-enquiries@bl.uk Date: Friday 11 January 2008

Dear Mr Baddeley. I am emailing in response to your enquiry about the petition from Ano Korakiana, Corfu. I have searched our catalogue and found that we have the thesis by Eleni Calligas in the British Library. I am appending the details, including the British Library shelfmark, to the end of this message. While searching the database 'Index to theses', I found two further theses which may be of interest. Unfortunately we do not hold either in the British Library. The theses are: British occupation of the Ionian Islands 1815-64 Markham, S F, 1929 B. Litt., Oxford 0-6856 The Ionian Islands under British administration 1815-1864 Tumelty J J 1952-1953 A9g Ph.D., Cambridge, Trinity Hall, 3-416 I hope this is of some help, though I have been unable to find anything presented to Birkbeck College. I have also searched Birkbeck's catalogue and the whole University of London Library catalogue. I found no further relevant theses, but did find that Dr. Calligas's thesis is also held at Senate House and at the Institute of Historical research. Yours sincerely, Helen Robbins.

The `Rizospastai' (Radical-Unionists): politics and nationalism in the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands, 1815-1964. Calligas, E., 1994, A9m British Library Shelfmark DX187456 Ph.D., London, London School of Economics, 44-9204

ABSTRACT: When the Ionian Islands were placed under British Protection in 1815, they were granted the right to regulate their internal affairs, but in the resultant 1817 Constitution political power emanated from the High Commissioner and was exercised through an authoritarian system of government. Ionian opposition acquired salient nationalist connotations during the Greek War of Independence although in the 1830s it was mostly confined to demands for liberal constitutional reform expressed by the so-called Ionian liberali. As the British introduced a reform programme that met many of the liberals' demands during the 1840s, a more radical opposition group emerged in Cephalonia, the largest and poorest of the seven islands. These political activists, who became known as the `Rizospastai' (Radical-Unionists), challenged the legitimacy of British Protection and favoured major internal socio-political changes on the basis of the right of national self-determination and the principle of popular sovereignty. Although they were involved in various popular demonstrations of discontent, they remained parliamentarians rather than revolutionaries and promoted their ideology through the press, political clubs and parliament, which they first entered in 1850. The growing popularity of the Rizospastai led the moderate liberal majority to co-operate with the High Commissioner in an effort to eradicate radicalism and exclude its representatives from the islands' polity. Most energetically pursued in Cephalonia, this governmental policy temporarily silenced the old radical leadership. However, a new leadership emerged from Zakynthos and, in the altered circumstances of the late 1850s, it redefined radicalism on purely unionist lines and carried most of the popular base with it. The `old' radicals, still considered heroes by a rather bewildered popular following, were isolated during the last years of the Protectorate and adamantly opposed the terms on which the Ionian Islands were finally ceded to Greece in 1864.

Von: Simon Baddeley [mailto:s.j.baddeley@bham.ac.uk] Gesendet: Sa 12.01.2008 12:37 An: Holger Afflerbach, Betreff: Re: AW: Continued search for petition from Ano Korakiana, Corfu

Dear Simon, my friend, DE, does not think that the paper he recalls is one of the three you mentioned. But both of us had the impression that the material you found so far should give you a quite nice overview on the question. D will be busy with other things in the next week, but he wants to come back to this in two weeks. If he finds something, I will give you notice. Best wishes, Holger

Comment from a Greek correspondent on my enquiry:

I'm not surprised they wanted the Brits to stay - the joke doing the rounds in Greece a few years back when the Brits were putting up strong resistance about the EU managing the national economy was that the Brits blanch when they're told that they'll have to cede sovereignty while for the Greeks it's a no-brainer when they're told that the Europeans will provide free funding for projects and an economist from Frankfurt to run the country's economy...

Seriously tho', it always happens that once you start looking at anything closely - in this instance, an historical event - it gets more complicated and morally confusing. More human. On the one hand there is the magnificent story of Byron giving his life for Greek freedom - 'The dead have been awakened - shall I sleep? The World's at war with tyrants - shall I crouch?' (19 June 1823) - on the other, an extract from his journal, as he and his companions waited in Cephalonia, ten months before his death at Missolonghi in April 1824:

As I did not come here to join a faction but a nation, and to deal with honest men and not with speculators or peculators, (charges bandied about daily by the Greeks of each other) it will require much circumspection to avoid the character of a partizan, and I perceive it to be the more difficult as I have already received invitations from more than one of the contending parties, always under the pretext that they are the 'real Simon Pure'. After all, one should not despair, though all the foreigners that I have hitherto met with from amongst the Greeks are going or gone back disgusted. Whoever goes into Greece at present should do it as Mrs Fry went into Newgate - not in the expectation of meeting with any especial indication of existing probity, but in the hope that time and better treatment will reclaim the present burglarious and larcenous tendencies which have followed this General Gaol delivery. When the limbs of the Greeks are a little less stiff from the shackles of four centuries, they will not march so much 'as if they had gyves on their legs'. At present the Chains are broken indeed; but the links are still clanking, and the Saturnalia is still too recent to have converted the Slave into a sober Citizen. The worst of them is that (to use a coarse but the only expression that will not fall short of the truth) they are such damned liars; there never was such an incapacity for veracity shown since Eve lived in Paradise. One of them found fault the other day with the English language, because it had so few shades of a Negative, whereas a Greek can so modify a 'No' to a 'Yes', and vice versa, by the slippery qualities of his language, that prevarication may be carried to any extent and still leave a loop-hole through which perjury may slip without being perceived. This was the Gentleman's own talk, and is only to be doubted because in the words of the Syllogism 'Now Epimenides was a Cretan'. But they may be mended by and bye. (28 Sept 1823 from Cephalonia)

I read of Byron often. I've hardly read Byron. Byron was read to me at school. I recall The Eve of Waterloo '... a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium's capital had gathered then, Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright, The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men ...'. That ignorance means the impression on me of his journal entry from Cefalonia is the greater; stronger for its poignancy (to the reader knowing he has 7 months to live) and acuity - evidence of how Byron's allegiance to the great cause of Greek independence was neither myopic nor sentimental. This points to a key element of my understanding of British love for Ελλάς - a feeling for Greece that does not eclipse an acute awareness of how her people, places and culture fall short of an impossible ideal. It is a love that evokes grief for past suffering, respect for her courage and ingenuity, contempt for her corruption, discomfort at her weaknesses, joy as her mountains top the horizon or emerge from haze or her dark sparkling terrain opens up beneath the gaze of a night-arriving plane, content at her good news, sad at the bad, delight in her company, pride, modesty and shame in due measure in contemplation of historic connections, and knowing that 'except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.' Further reading: Athanasios S E Gekas (2004) Class formation in the Ionian Islands during the period of British rule, 1814-1864, Economic History Department, LSE & Phd University of Essex William Miller (1966) The Ottoman Empire and Its Successors 1801-1927, New York: Octagon Books Harold Temperley (1937) Documents Illustrating the Cession of the Ionian Islands to Greece, 1848-70, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 9, No. 1, Mar., pp. 48-55 Extract from Temperley, p.49:

There are three periods, corresponding roughly to the three phases of the question: A. Period of abortive proposals, 1848-65 I. Lord John Russell on possible cession to Austria, May 1, 1848 11. Palmerston on possible retention, December 21, 1850 111. Gladstone against annexation to England, February 2, 1855 B. Gladstone's attempt at settlement as high commissioner extraordinary, and its aftermath, 1858-61 IV. His views on prevalent misconceptions, March 22, 1861 C. Period of cession and its aftermath, 1862-YO V. Gladstone on the cabinet decision, December 8, 1862 VI. The queen's assent, December 9, 1862 VII. Clarendon in retrospect, March 15, 1870

Temperley, p.51

. . . an incident occurred which knocked on the head Palmerston's plan of a British annexation of Corfu. The Daily News obtained surreptitiously and published a copy of a dispatch from Sir John Young, High commissioner of the Ionian Islands. Thus the world learned that Young advocated a British annexation of Corfu. Gladstone, then on his way out, had to explain matters at Vienna, while Derby and Walmesbury disavowed the Corfu annexation scheme. It was ostensibly Young's, but had actually been an idea of Palmerston's; and when Derby's government fell and was succeeded by Palmerston's, the latter did not find it possible to reverse his policy. Gladstone, though he defeated British annexationism, could not reconcile the reluctant Ionians to British ideas. Their methods dismayed him: when they obstructed him by speaking, as one orator did, for two days; or when they were openly violent and seditious. No sound British constitutionalism was a good exchange for union with Greece. Ionians were Greeks and detested any government, however good, so long as it was British. They could love any government, however bad, so long as it was Greek. Their ideal was not, and could not be, Magna Carta. It was Hellas. There never was, nor could be, contentment in the Ionian Islands until the last British soldier left them. The Whigs returned to office in 1859, and Russell certainly considered the question of cession to Greece as early as 1860. But in 1861 his colleague Gladstone was still venting his wrath on those persons who, in his view, misrepresented the question. He had not yet accepted cession, and the cabinet was still undecided.