Going back to England

After midnight, Amy and Guy were waiting at Birmingham Airport to pick us up. Lin was annoyed. "You're both supposed to be at work really early". I was relieved and grateful, knowing we had missed the last bus when the taxi fare doubles to £40 - and we were not going to pay that to get back to Handsworth. The journey home had been on a calm sea via Igoumenitsa and Ancona from where we took a stopping train to Rome Termini, and another to Fiumicino for our flight home. I scanned a UK newspaper full of financial panic stories I'd already seen on the web while in Greece. Home was tidy, with a pile of mail, no unwelcome letters and a couple of £50 Premium Bond wins. The university server was down and is still down at 0915 this Wednesday morning. I shall get on my bicycle and go to campus. * * * Far off by Vido as the dusk gathers a liner departs. We can watch its progress north from the balcony until it passes up the straits behind Pantokrator. * * * At the top of the thirteen shallow steps on the short path that leads by 208 onto Democracy Street, Faiakon Council has - as in other places in the village where there’s a drop - put up a deep green railing, by which people chat in the street. It is one of the sounds here, along with the cars slowed by the narrows, negotiating with other cars various unmarked broadenings. Lads on scooters, unaffected, often speed by at over the marked 20kph limit. The road is at last open again but the new drains haven’t reached us yet, and we’re unsure whether we want to pay the service charge for connection when they do. Our cesspool seems to work fine – especially now that we, unlike the previous owners, are not putting bleach and other disinfectants down the sink or loo. * * * Down at the harbour we’ve had Summer Song’s mast down, replaced halliards, repaired the masthead lights, and the worn pulley wheel that had made it so tricky to raise and lower the jib. Between us, Dave’s wife Trish and I filmed him and Ben, their son, as they went through the tricky process of getting the mast down and back up. Until at least one halliard was safe, no-one was going to risk using the existing tackle to go up the mast and do repairs without this operation. Now if any more work needs doing someone can go up on a new rope. I feel the better for having seen what’s happening up there. It’s saved us money doing the job at her berth in the harbour, rather than going to a yard and paying for a crane. Lin has painted a Greek phonetic version of Summer Song on an old tyre - ΣΑΜΕΡ (oops! she put an 'R' instead of a 'Ρ') ΣΟΝ - which I cut to shape. Dave screwed it to the end of our mended jetty. Τhe 'R' can be made a 'P' with some black paint, meantime pedants can enjoy pointing out the mistake. Before we left I tidied the boat. For a minute or so an insufficiently tightened jubilee clip had meant a cooling water pipe coming loose. Starting the engine to turn the boat between lowering and raising her mast, I'd seen no water coming out of the exhaust - a routine check I mightn't have made a year ago. The only harm was having to pump and sponge a couple of buckets of seawater out of the bilges. * * * Dave has hand sewn the head of Summer Song's furling genoa where it ripped. It'll work, but there's another problem. From top to bottom - head to clew - along the leech of the sail - its' outer edge - there is meant to be a strip of light blue sail about a 9" wide which acts as a sun shield it when it's fully furled on its rollers. This 'sacrificial' strip has become very tattered. Dave suggests unpicking it entirely. The sail now goes up and down so easily that I might as well lower, detach and store it after each sail. That's an idea. Having the strip removed and replaced professionally could cost as much as a new sail; far more than a useable secondhand one. Just before we left, Mark, who came, with Sally and her brother, to supper at 208, kindly agreed to take the sail away and see what could be done about repairing it before we returned. * * * Blue recycling bins have appeared round about. Fran and Dave told us of one near them in the village and Dave mentioned a new recycling site nearing completion at Temploni. Pleasing. There are no blue bins yet on Democracy Street but we are sorting out plastic, tins, paper and bottles before getting rid of our rubbish in ones further away. How well the new bins are being used I'm unsure. They have separate holes on the top for different items which are get mixed together inside, with the lids often so loose, or just left open, that people are chucking in sacks of current recyclables still mixed up in plastic bags. Misuse of recycling bins seems to be the norm whenever they are first introduced. Their survival, and the spread of recycling habits, depends on councils or their contractors getting tougher and cleverer about preventing and educating, combining stick and carrot. Fix My Street is a good example in England. * * * I bumped into Kostas Apergis yesterday in the shop further down the street, while collecting our electric bill. Told him I’d visited St.Elias; that I would definitely search for the rumoured petition from the village elders to the High Commissioner in the 1860s asking the British not to abandon the Protectorate. There is a grumble at the moment among some local politicians, part fueled by post-Olympic resentment at money famine for local government across the country. Too much that needs repair is falling into disrepair. Too much foreign money spent in the island leaks out of the economy or never gets into it in the first place. It doesn't help that Athens has introduced a 10% income tax on the first €10,000 of Greek residents' earnings - previously exempt. [Back to the future: January 09 - the government has withdrawn this tax] Harry Tsoukalas speaks of candidates standing on an 'independence for Corfu' ticket at local elections in two year's time, seeking through bravura to renegotiate the balance of funding between centre and locality. A Greek rebuttal on YouTube includes the title 'British rubbish' - no doubt because Tsoukalas' views on the 'huge problems in this paradise' received serious attention from the BBC and The Guardian. There's history here. The prospect of 'faction' sent shivers through the British polity in the aftermath of our civil war, invoking passionate charges and counter-charges of treason and sedition. It wasn't paranoia. it was terror at the prospect of a return to the 'heart of darkness' ("The horror! The horror!"). That was 360 years ago. Civil War in mainland Britain is off the public's radar. In Greece civil war is just 60 years old; in the memories of many still alive. Wounds are unhealed; the subject is only just entering Greece's history books for grown-ups. It's not safe yet for primary school texts. Volatile feelings, including many contrary interpretations of what went on between 1945 and 1950 and the 'stone years' - πέτρινα χρόνια - that followed, are lodged in the popular psyche. Talk of 'autonomy' or 'independence' can prompt visceral reaction, outside the appreciation of those for whom bloody civil strife is more remote. Corfucius - British with inherited colonial sensibilities as erratic ('I love writing and I love hiding behind words.' 20/4/08) as mine (Sir Henry Maine on the Council for India and Master of Trinity Hall; Sidney Baddeley, military secretary to the Governor-General of Madras; another grandfather and father earning CMGs) - makes some choice comments on the silliness of the imputation that GB could have the slightest interest in - let alone the capacity - for such an initiative - and it wasn't mentioned by Tsoukalas who speaks sensibly in Greek and English. In The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean 1850-1960, Robert Holland and Diana Markides wrote - between pages 13 and 80 [Chapter 2 - Gladstone and the Greeks: The Extraordinary Mission to the Ionian Islands, 1858-1859, and Chapter 3 - The Abandonment of the Ionian Protectorate, 1849-1864] about Gladstones' visit to Greece, especially Corfu, between 24 November 1858 and 19 February 1859. This consummate politician had the delicate task of finding a way to extricate Britain from a Protectorate that had become a costly entanglement - given Malta's availability as a strategic naval base - without making it look as if our departure was an abandonment of the responsibilities that had led us to take up the role of Ionian Protector, a betrayal of our allies on the island, or a retreat forced on us by those keen for union with independent Greece. Gladstone found himself utterly absorbed 'in the affairs of these little islands...The complexity of the case is inversely (so to speak) as the extent of the sphere.' (William Gladstone Diary, 31 Dec 1858) Eleni Calligas is the current expert on this subject - much quoted in other academic studies of these events. Her 1994 doctoral thesis is titled 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.

Calligas, Markides and Holland remain intrigued by the history of these years, not least because the dynamic tensions between different groups within the Ionian and mainland polities which Gladstone and his successor Sir Henry Storks in Corfu, Sir Henry Elliott in Athens, Lords Palmerston and Russell in London tried to understand, navigate and exploit, exist but slightly transmuted to this day - they are in the Hellenic grain. I hope there's another book there. I like Calligas's reference to a 'rather bewildered popular following'. Holland and Markides suggest that the way the British government extracted themselves from Corfu served as a precedent for colonial departures to come. What this talented Greek-English authorial collaboration call the 'abandonment' of the Protectorate, was an early model for finessing imperial withdrawal - one that the British have been doing quite well for over a century, and which the English are now doing from Scotland and Wales, after grim practice in Ulster (my talk in Tokyo - "England: her own last colony"). Giving up power is no less fraught than taking it, but there's a more pervasive moral underlying these proposals and rebuttals, interpretations and counter-interpretations of what happened when Corfu and Britain separated - Holland's and Markides' theme being continuing relations between the British and the Hellenes. This is less dry - a matter of passionate inconsistency among all parties; an enduring affaire, full of rumour, misinterpreted motives, hidden agendas, exaggerated simplifications, curses, tearful embraces, forgiveness, anger, reproach, estrangement and reconciliation. Sounds like family.

Anyone seeking real political leverage; any possibility of access to the hi-politics of present Corfu in its relations with Athens, needs to have spent time networking in Brussels and Strasbourg, not to mention building links with other Ionian polities. Kefalonia played the rebel against the Protectorate in the 1860s (Miranta Paximapolou-Stavrinou Rebellions of Cephalonia in the years 1848 and 1849, Athens 1980). The British executed twenty one men there in 1849. I respect those trying to make sense of the issues that surround the landfill at Lefkimmi, characterised by secrecy, confusion, miscommunication and now violence. (Lefkimmiblog.forum - in Greek and ditto Lefkimmiblog and ΧΥΤΑ ΛΕΥΚΙΜΜΗΣ and Lefkimmi Demos - the local council.)

Born in Corfu and growing up on the island before emigrating to Australia, Harry Tsoukalas returned to Corfu, enthusiastic from experience in Australia about what could be done in Corfu about 'going green'. He's a civil engineer, a successful businessman directing a Corfu estate agency specialising in selling old houses for renovation. He started the Corfu Heritage Preservation Foundation, using it to get attention from UNESCO to some of Corfu's oldest villages. With his brother, Lefteris, he advises incomers who've bought properties on how to renovate them in ways that respect Corfu's great architectural tradition. In last year's April edition of The Corfiot he announced the first of three recycling yards, charging €50 to receive rubble which, at 20 cubic metres per truckload, would normally cost ten times as much taken to a municipal site. I understand that one of the new recycling sites is near Kontokali on the inland inner road close to Danilia junction [info@petracon.biz 6947269112 or 6932606332]. I've not checked these details. My sources are, in many cases, from Tsoukalas himself, and from Hilary Paipeti, his partner and enthusiatic promoter, but Tsoukalas and his allies (in addition to island jealousies) face conservative inertia on care for the environment that is not special to Greece. Now he is challenging Athens. New ideas start small. Tsoukalas' capacity to cope with threats, ridicule, even contempt, will be a measure of the man and his growing political experience. I realise that we, as EU citizens, can vote in local elections in Corfu.

* * *

26/9/08 Environment Commissioner on climate change BRUSSELS (ANA-MPA/M. Aroni): Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas, replying to a question by the press shortly after his meeting in Brussels with Polish Environment Minister Maciej Nowicki, expressed confidence that the European Union will not back down on the commitments it has undertaken to combat climatic changes as a result of the fiscal crisis. "…the crisis of climatic changes is permanent and it is threatening the planet. It is not permissible that targets should be changed because a crisis has broken out this month or because some other one will break out in the next." See his page on landfill and associated issues - Green Cities for Life - and his warning to Greece earlier in the year.

"The deadline for shutting down illegal landfills by the end of 2008 that was imposed by the European Court of Justice is fast approaching...A decade ago, Greece was forced to pay €5.4 million in fines before shutting down the major landfill of Kouroupitos on the island of Crete...future fines will be steeper. The ECJ now imposes hefty fines that would make the Kouroupitos case a painless memory by comparison..." 21 April 2008

Igoumenitsa ahead - Corfu ferry Eleni 30 September 2008

Reading through the Ionian Protectorate archives

The Ottoman Empire, Rumelia and the Septinsular Republic

The human geography is confusing. Rumelia, Djezair, Wallachia, Anatolia, Cyrenaica? Names of places keep shifting, appearing in different versions, different languages. From secondary sources - mainly the web - I know that over four centuries the Venetians ruled Corfu and the six other Ionian islands - Corfu especially on the front-line between Imperial Ottoman Islam and Christian Europe - then for two years at the end of the 18th century, the islands, taken from Venice as part of Napoleon's rearrangement of Europe, became the French Departements Mer-Égée, Ithaque et Corcyre. Revolutionary jubilation suffused the population as the privileges of the island's Venetian aristocracy were abolished, but taxation of Corfiots and ill-discipline among the French soldiery soured relations.

Just before Christmas 1798 Admiral Ushakov with a joint Russian-Ottoman fleet besieged the garrison at Corfu. Despite extra fortifications, the French surrendered in March 1799. In 1800 the seven islands were declared the Septinsular Republic, a tributary state of Sultan Mahmud II - the closest the Turks ever got to ruling Corfu, though the new Republic was in effect a Russian Protectorate, supported by a population of fellow Orthodox Christians - the period during which the Corfiot noble, Count Ioannis Kapodistrias, who, twenty five years later, would become president of the new republic of Greece, gained his first experience of government.

In 1807, under the Treaty of Tilsit, the French re-annexed the Ionian Islands placing them under the governorate of General Cæsar Berthier. A year later the wider European conflict brought the British soldier John Oswald to the Mediterranean, in charge of a brigade harrying the coast of French-occupied Italy and, then, in 1809 leading a force to invade the Ionian Islands capturing Zante, Ithaka, Cerigo and Cephalonia, where Oswald announced:

We present ourselves to you, Inhabitants of Cephalonia, not as Invaders, with views of conquest, but as Allies who hold forth to you the advantages of British protection.

In 1810 Oswald and Richard Church, an Anglo-Irish career soldier, invaded Santa Maura (modern Lefkada or Levkas) with a force of 2000 British and Greek soldiers, many of the latter to become fighters in the Greek War of Independence. They captured Levkas after heavy fighting. For this Oswald was made governor of the Ionian Islands, based in Zante, maintaining a British strategic presence, forming diplomatic relations with the Ottoman governors of mainland Greece. When Oswald left for England in 1811, Richard Church (later to become a General in the Greek War of Independence) succeeded. After less than a year, Church, slowly recovering from an arm wound incurred in the battle for Levkas, gave up the the governorship to George Airey, to tour through Ottoman occupied Greece as far as Constantinople.

After Napoleon's first abdication but before his return from exile in Elba and the battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815, came the Congress of Vienna at which, over eight months between November 1814 and June 1815, allied ambassadors negotiated a map of post-Napoleonic Europe. Richard Church presented a report to Congress arguing that the Ionian Islands should stay under the British flag, recommending its extension to Parga and other Greek mainland towns in the possession of Ali Pasha of Yanina.

Corfu, defended by a French garrison under General Donzelot, was ordered by Louis XVIII to surrender to Sir James Campbell. After Napoleon's final defeat and second abdication, Great Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia under the Treaty of Paris - 9th November 1815 - agreed to place the United States of the Ionian Islands under the 'amical protection' of Great Britain, and to give Austria the right of equal commercial advantage with the protecting country, a plan strongly approved by Count Kapodistria. This arrangement reinforced by the 'Maitland constitution' of 26 August 1817, creating a federation of the seven islands, with Sir Thomas Maitland its first High Commissioner [of Maitland's rule I've more to learn, but see p.174 of this reference: 'a colossal statue' in Cephalonia, a bust by Canova in Zante, a monument in Ithaka and a 'second triumphal arch' in Santa Maura! Chap. VI of the 1821 Edinburgh Annual Register, Sir Walter Scott's ambitious and eventually failed encyclopedic project for which I'm grateful and - 16/6/09 - a comment from Paxos on my flickr posting of Maitland's signature]

Thomas Maitland, second High Commissioner

explains "the advantages of British Protection" 1819

The United States of the Ionian Islands 1817 ~ National Archives

This arrangement lasted until 1864, three decades after the land across the narrow Ionian Sea, had, over eight years of gory insurrection against Ottoman rule, become the independent Kingdom of the Hellenes.

How the islands became united with Greece to be ruled from Athens is a complicated story - one which which surfaces in different versions even today, focusing on whether the British Protectorate was good or bad for Ionians, whether, when we did leave, we jumped or were pushed, and the advantages and disadvantages of union with mother Greece

Coach 420 on the M1 to London and the National Archives

To get more than second-hand insights I need to visit primary sources; see and carefully touch original papers, scan the gestures of official handwriting. So, I'm up at 5.30 for a day in London; cycling to Digbeth for a coach to Victoria (£9.40 return, and my folding bike in its bag accepted as luggage) then catching a District Line Underground to Kew, with a packed lunch from Lin.

I've already learned that the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands, including Corfu, was headed by thirteen governors or rather a 'Commissioner' changed to 'Lord High Commissioners' - Sir James Campbell in 1814; half a century and twelve commissioners later, Sir Henry Storks, and overseeing the transition to union - enosis, Ένωσις - in 1864 with the Hellenic monarchy, the Greek Count Dimitrios Nikolaou Karousos [scroll down to the Ionian Islands on this link listing lead politicians and officials over the years ].

Primary sources at The National Archives

But now to the formal and informal writings, official reports, petitions, newspaper extracts, copies of letters sent and received (those in French, Greek and Italian translated, to my relief, into English) along with marginal comments. These are bound in heavy volumes bearing the impress of the Colonial Office. They can be studied in the Reading Room of The National Archives at Kew, which I visited for the first time yesterday, in pursuit of unsatisfied curiosity about what Robert Holland and Diana Markides call The Abandonment of the Ionian Protectorate 1859-1864 in their fascinating history - The British and the Hellenes.

I'm also on a long delayed errand following the letter I got from Thanassis Spingos and Kostas Apergis in Ano Korakiana in December 2007:

Dear Simon. It is said that before the Union of the Ionian Islands with Greece (1864), inhabitants of Ano Korakiana signed a 'paper' asking the British Government to keep the islands under 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...

When I see Kostas or Thannassis I feel embarrassed at my delay. I think I've feared not finding the document they asked me about - through lack of diligence; through not being able to read the language in which it may be couched. After five hours hefting requested books from the locker allocated me in the Reading Room to my allocated desk I'd had a fascinating dip into original sources, gaining confidence as I went along, especially as all documents in Greek or Italian have an English translation attached. Only some of the handwriting is hard to follow.

I'd arrived as an ingénue. The staff at the National Archives are pros - bright, unpatronising. The place teems with people who know their way - veteran researchers - and others, like me, there for the first time.

First step was leaving my folding bicycle and bag in a cloakroom chained 'keep your key...put your laptop and pencils - no pens - in a transparent plastic bag.' Then came the daily briefing for newbies on how to get started - 20 minutes helpful guidance; then to 'The Learning Zone', a few yards away on the same floor where a bank of helpers, screens on-line to the archives, gave hints on catalogue searching. To see Ionian Protectorate documents I'd need a reader's card. That involved five minutes being photographed and showing ID - driving licence and a utility bill. I haven't done original text research for so long, it was like going back to school, with the excitement but not the trepidation. Finally I strolled through a polite security check, swiped my new card and came to the Reading Room.

Here you check in at an enquiry counter and are allocated a triangular space on one of many circular desks. Grey polystyrene blocks for large volumes to protect book spines, little weights like necklaces, so you don't have to press pages down with your fingers, and stands for taking photos with your own or a provided camera are to hand. I was also allocated a locker with the same number as my desk space - 20C - in one of two bays of about a hundred tiered lockers; all with glass doors on the reader's side, open at the bac. As we were told at the briefing talk, you order up to three items from the catalogue, with a note over the desk and, after a bit, by sitting at a computer screen by the counter, entering your reader's number from your card and searching and ordering; the computer keeping a tally of what you've requested already. After a maximum of 40 minutes - time for a coffee downstairs - the first three volumes had been placed in my locker. I could take them, one at a time, to study at my desk space, having ordered the next three items. By the time I'd looked through the first three, the next batch were in my locker. I could take them back to a 'returns' counter or leave everything I'd requested in my locker. (For future visits the first set of documents can be ordered from my kitchen table or wherever I have access to the web, ready for my arrival. Indeed a large part of the National Archives are catalogued for on-line search).

I asked for the documents suggested by Eleni Calligas, the young scholar who knows her way around these sources as well as anyone, an expert in Ionian politics and Hellenic nationalism:

I would suggest that the best place to look is the High Commissioner's Correspondence at the Colonial Office archive of the Protection, housed in the Public Record Office, now re-named National Archives but still held at the Kew. I would look at the last couple of years, from 1862 onwards - probably starting from CO136/177 to /184. If such a petition does exist and is signed by inhabitants of the village, it would be interesting to identify the local figure of importance, as the initiative probably emanated from there.

Five months before the British Protectorate ended

So, on my first visit to the National Archives I've found no petition from Ano Korakiana nor mention of any of the senior names of the village - Savvanis, Vradis, Mandilas, Ionas, Markos, Metallinos, Laskaris, Kaloudis, Linosporis, Reggis, Balatsinos, Kendarchos or Kefallonitis - nor from Kinopiastes - about 6 miles south of Corfu Town - nor, indeed, from any other village on the island.

This does not really surprise me. I understand from Kostas and Thannassis that the two villages on Corfu, and another whose name I don't know, on Zakinthos, were opposed to enosis, and even today - so I read in May's edition of The Corfiot Magazine - of the island's eighteen bands, the philharmonic orchestras of Korakiana and Kinopiastes do not play at the celebrations of Unification Day held in Corfu each 21 May.

[A check on the Ano Korakiana website shows the Samaras Philharmonia Band was a definite presence in Corfu Town on 21 May, along with the three bands from Corfu Town - a reminder, as ever, to check sources! "Η Φιλαρμονική της Κορακιάνας που συμμετέχει κάθε χρόνο στην εκδήλωση αυτή, μαζί με τις τρεις Φιλαρμονικές της πόλης της Κέρκυρας, είχε μια πολύ καλή, ισορροπημένη και «δεμένη» μουσικά, παρουσία, κερδίζοντας τις εντυπώσεις, σύμφωνα με τα σχόλια που μπορούσε κανείς να ακούσει."]

It's possible the petition, if it was a petition on paper rather than a representation delivered orally to Sir Henry Knight Storks, has disappeared from the record, or was never allowed to appear on it. Given the profile of enthusiasm displayed for enosis and the denigration of pro-English sentiments reported by Sir Henry, it's possible that opposition was expressed more privately than support.

I shall search the Storks files again, and look also at Foreign Office files, but it may be that I need to go back to the extraordinary tenure at the High Commissioner's Palace of William Gladstone, over seven weeks between the 24 November 1858 and the 19 February 1859.** Perhaps it was during those weeks, before enosis seemed given, that the elders of Ano Korakiana and others delivered petitions against the ending of the Protectorate.

Such opinions may be unrealistic; they're still expressed, thus Harry Tsoukalas, a business man on the island, planning to stand in the 2009 EU elections in a week:

These things are anathema to say but the truth is that unification with Greece was the darkest day in our history. It was a huge mistake that we have regretted ever since.

In Chapter 2 of their book, Holland and Markides, report Gladstone visiting Athens as part of his Ionian mission. While there he sounded out Ionian and Greek politician on unification:

This analysis stressed 'a divided sentiment' in Greek thinking on the matter, so that union was 'feared as well as desired'. The desire sprang from a natural inclination to cohabit with fellow Hellenes; the fear from the prospect of incorporating a branch of their race whose competitive abilities and education were so finely honed. In sum, the Greeks of the kingdom were fearful that union would turn out to be 'an annexation of Greece to the Islands, not of the Island's to Greece. (p.32)

In a letter to the Duke of Newcastle, (scroll down on the link to '23.12.1862') Colonial Office Minister, in London, Sir Henry Storks includes a translation of an unsigned note in Greek found in Corfu Town:

May the curses of St Spixidion(?)* light on him, who cries long live union with Greece.

Signature of Sir Henry Knight Storks, Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands 1859-1863

*Note: Almost certainly St.Spyridon - Ἃγιος Σπυρίδων - Corfu's protective patron saint.

**Note: Harold Temperley (1937) in '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, on p.49 describes three phases - covering at least 22 years - of the question of the ending of the British Protectorate:

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-

V. Gladstone on the cabinet decision, December 8, 1862 VI. The queen's assent, December 9, 1862 VII. Clarendon in retrospect, March 15, 1870

* * *

'...not as Invaders, with views of conquest, but as Allies...'

The way the British and the Ionians parted company in 1864 is an exercise in the refined political delicacy with which a lose-lose, or at best a win-lose, situation can be turned into one that goes down in history, often to the bewilderment of those looking for a fight, as one in which almost all feel they've won, though quite a few, as Eleni Calligas observed of the Corfiot radicals, may be left bewildered. Such developments cannot be arrived at by one party to the potential conflict. The work of both, behind closed doors, is vital to the legerdemain of peaceful resolution. Apart from my particular interest in the mysterious petition from Ano Korakiana, this is why the peaceful and dignified conclusion of the Ionian Protectorate is of such enduring interest. In the records I was scanning on Wednesday I saw a translated slip passed to the Commissioner's desk in the last year of the Protectorate; 'If I my wife were pregnant with a child that I knew to be harbouring pro-English sentiments, I would rip it from her womb.' Storks notes receipt and makes no written comment.

How did two parties, both of proven historical capacity for immeasurable blood-letting, end up on 21 May 1864 at the Port of Corfu, participating, against a background of jovial band music, in a joint ceremony, with bunting, flag waving, roaring salutes, bowing, hand shaking and smiles? It was the happy culmination of an exercise in political wisdom that benefits the English in Corfu to this day.

I conjecture that at the opening of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens on 20 June 2009 we shall witness - or, rather, not witness, because their machinations will be circumspect, circuitous and opaque - the prefatory manoeuvering of two politically cunning nations, as they finesse a way of speaking about the contentious issue of 'the marbles' that will eventually allow both parties to claim victory in conserving, maintaining, and restoring that ancient marmoreal commentary on the contest between Athena and Poseidon. Nationalists, kriegsliebers, keyboard warriors, from both sides, will grind their teeth in bewildered vexation, as the British and Greek flags unite, amid fireworks and mingled anthems, at a ceremony of many embraces and a thousand kisses, on a date to be agreed.

* * *

Από: Simon Baddeley Θέμα: Researching the National Archives at Kew in London Προς: korakiana_com@yahoo.gr Ημερομηνία: Παρασκευή, 29 Μάιος 2009, 10:44

Dear Thanasis and Kostas. At last I got myself to the National Archives at Kew in London to search for any clues on that 'petition' from the village. It's been v.interesting but so far I have not found any document from Ano Korakiana or Kinopiastes. I have found many references though to the mixed feelings of people from the Ionian Islands - especially Corfu - about enosis in 1864. I plan to go back next week. If you have any further clues or advice do please pass this to me. Here is my diary with some images of my visit to to the Archives on Wednesday. Kindest regards. Xerete and wish me luck! Simon, Beaudesert Road, B20 3TG, UK

From: Κβκ Κορακιανα Date: Sun 31 May 2009 To: Simon Baddeley

Dear Simon. We are so glad to hear from you. Unfortunately we haven't had any clues so far but it's been very interesting for us to bring some references especially from Corfu. Thank you very much. We are looking forward to seeing you. Thanasis-Costas

Ionian Islands electoral lists ~ 1861 (Sta.Maura = Lefkadas)

* * *Having written to Corfiot News querying the report in the May edition about Ano Korakiana's band absenting itself from the annual celebration on 21 May of enosis with Greece in 1864, I got a reply on 2 June from Hilary Paipeti with permission to repeat it referencing the source - The Corfiot Magazine

Hi, thanks for that. It was always a tradition that Kinopiastes and Korakiana didn't go, but maybe that's changed. I'll amend it for next time! Hilary. PS Here is an archive article...

'Celebrating Union with Greece' Corfu News, Saturday, 15 May 1965:

In 1814 Great Britain, after a decision with the Great Powers of that time - Austria, Russia and France - established herself in the Ionian Islands as a ‘Protecting Power’. It was after the Napoleonic wars and the fall of the great Corsican, when the oppressive violence of the Holy Alliance was clouding the aged continent. A few years later liberating movements started in the whole of Europe. The revolution of 1821 gave the Greeks a conscience of their national rights and awakened into the souls of the enslaved the desire of freedom. The liberated Greek kingdom exercised an irresistible attraction to the people of the Ionian Islands. The French revolution of 1848 - which history considers as a starting point of the people’s spring - urged the Ionians to more vigorous claims. The first demands for a more liberal self-government formed, with the passing years, a strong national and social character. So, when in 1859 Gladstone was sent by the British government to the Ionian Islands to find a conciliatory solution, which would secure the continuation of the established regime of the Protectorate, the only voice he heard was ‘Union and only Union’. Four years later Great Britain was compelled to yield to the liberating struggle of the Ionians to accept the Union of the Septinsular State with Greece. On May 21 1864, the Greek flag was hoisted over the Citadel. Corfu and the six other Ionian Islands became an inseparable part of the independent Greek state.

To this Hilary added, from Corfiot News archives, this contemporary report on events on the island on 21 May 1864 - source not mentioned:

On the day of Union with Greece, British soldiers were exchanging military salutes with the Greek soldiers who had arrived to take over. When the Greek officer gave the order ‘Present Arms!’, one of the Corfiot spectators laughed and commented: ‘You hear that? These miserable Greeks have only just arrived, and already they’re begging!’ The Greek army was represented by some soldiers from the 10th Regiment, headed by General Pisa, who had been commanded to take over the island and its fortresses. As the British troops embarked into their warship and left, the general, together with the military and political leadership of the island, made his way to the Church of Saint Spiridon for a thanksgiving mass. Meanwhile, the common people were not so thankful. Under foreign rule for centuries, they now felt the time for revenge against the elite had come, and they lusted to pillage and burn the mansions of the landlords. And new authority was not yet in place. The people of Potamos, led by their political leader, Heimarios, set off for Town, advancing and shouting curses. Heimarios tried at first to calm them as he feared a confrontation with the army. But finding that impossible, he tried to persuade them to head for the countryside. ‘That’s where the big fight will be!’ he promised. But the most hot-blooded would not listen. They reached Platytera, where the Maltese community lived, and attacked the gardens and fields and smallholdings of the workers of that poor area. Heimarios could not stop them. But then he shrugged and said to himself: ‘Well, let them get on with it. Let them work off their anger on the Maltese, who have no mansions. The worst they can do is beat up a few locals, and steal a goat or two, and they’ll be happy. When we get back to the village, they’ll have calmed down and we can give the animals back.’ The Maltese men were absent, and only old people and children were at home. The Potamites did not harm them. They untied the sheep and cows, herded the grazing sheep, set fire to some thatches, and returned with their grand spoils to Potamos. They entered the village singing in celebration. But at the outskirts, they were brought up short by screams coming from their own houses. While they had themselves been looting, the men of Kontokali, returning in a gang from Town, had put into action a long-held plan to attack Potamos as soon as the British left. They entered the village from the east, causing the women and children to flee. Then they beat up a few remaining men, barged into the houses, and looted everything they could lay their hands on. After the initial shock at finding them there, the men of Potamos struck back, and the gang from Kontokali, caught in the surprise attack, fled down the hill. It was a remarkable sight - the Kontokalites fleeing with their booty, chased by the furious Potamites. But the runaways were weighed down with their loot, so as they ran they were the shedding clothes, tools and household goods they had stolen. The men of Potamos chased them as far as the outskirts of Kontokali. Spiros Peroulakis, a shoemaker from Potamos, was an eye-witness to the mayhem. It was a spectacle that rendered him speechless. The whole scene was a seething battleground, a mass of bodies - men, women and children - struggling against each other with scythes and spades. Meanwhile, two villagers from Korakiana appeared, running with sweat and panting fit to burst. They entered the kafenion where Peroulakis had taken refuge. ‘Give us water!’ they demanded. ‘We’re dying of thirst!’ ‘What are you running for?’ asked Peroulakis. They told him that they were on their way to Town to report to the army that Korakiana was being attacked by a group of about two hundred men from Skripero. At first, Peroulakis was under the impression that they were pillaging the houses of the landlords, but the men told him that they were looting the common houses, stealing oil and wine, and breaking into dowry chests. ‘Why don’t you call on your own men to protect their houses?’ asked Peroulakis. ‘We tried,’ was the reply, ‘but they were too busy looting in Skripero!’ And that is how the Union of the Ionian Islands was celebrated in Corfu’s villages.

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.