🇬🇷 Greece · Ionian Islands
Corfu does not look like the rest of Greece, and that is exactly its appeal. While almost every Greek island spent four centuries under the Ottoman Empire, Corfu and the rest of the Ionians spent four centuries under Venice and never fell to the Turks. The result is an island that smells of Italy: narrow lanes with washing strung between balconies, churches with Venetian bell towers, French arcades where you can have a coffee, fortresses crowning the sea and an Old Town so beautiful it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Add to that a green blanket of olive trees and cypresses covering mountains and turquoise bays.
The island was a refuge for empresses and kaisers — the Austrian Sisi had the Achilleion palace built here — and the setting of the magical childhood Gerald Durrell described in 'My Family and Other Animals'. Today it combines that cosmopolitan past with beaches for every taste: the dramatic coves of Paleokastritsa, the curious formations of the Canal d'Amour at Sidari, the party atmosphere of the south and quiet coves in the north, under Mount Pantokrator. Corfu is culture, history and sea all at once, with no need to choose.
This guide covers Corfu with a practical, warm eye: how to get around the Old Town and its two fortresses, when and how to visit the Achilleion, where the best beaches are, how to arrive by ferry from Italy or Albania and how to use the island as a gateway to the Ionians. Corfu rewards those looking for Venetian ruins and museums as much as those who only want a taverna with a sea view and a glass of kumquat, the local liqueur made from a dwarf orange brought by the British.
Colonised by the Corinthians in the 8th century BC as Kérkyra, the island already appears in the Odyssey as the land of the Phaeacians who received Odysseus. It was Byzantine for centuries, but its fate was sealed in 1386, when it gave itself to the Republic of Venice: four centuries (until 1797) that marked it forever and during which it withstood repeated Ottoman sieges without ever falling, something unique in Greece. After a brief spell of Napoleonic France came the short-lived Septinsular Republic (1800), the first semi-independent Greek state of the modern era, and then the British protectorate (1815–1864), which left palaces, aqueducts, roads and even cricket. In 1864 the Ionians joined Greece. In June 1944 the Nazis deported almost the entire Jewish community of Corfu to Auschwitz. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The western islands that were never Ottoman: four centuries of Venetian rule, the short-lived Septinsular Republic, the British protectorate and union with Greece in 1864, marked by a singular Italian-Greek culture and by the 1953 earthquake that flattened Kefalonia and Zakynthos.
Read the history of Ionian Islands →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Corfu enters history through the door of myth. For the ancients, this green island facing the coast of Epirus was Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians: the hospitable people who, according to the Odyssey, took in a shipwrecked and naked Odysseus, entertained him at the court of King Alcinous and Princess Nausicaa, and finally returned him to his Ithaca on a magic ship. Local tradition even identifies the tiny island of Pontikonisi, off Kanoni, with that ship turned to stone by Poseidon. Myth or not, the Odyssey shows that the island's name already echoed in the Greek world in Homeric times.
Documented history begins in the 8th century BC, when colonists from Corinth founded the city of Kérkyra here (around 734 BC), one of the oldest and most prosperous Greek settlements in the Adriatic. Placed in a strategic position on the sea route between Greece and Italy, Kérkyra grew quickly, developed a powerful fleet and came to rival its own mother city. The clash between Corinth and Corcyra over the colony of Epidamnus, around 435 BC, was one of the sparks that lit the Peloponnesian War, as Thucydides tells it: the island allied with Athens and was caught up in the great conflict that bled Greece dry.
From that classical period, archaeological remains survive in the Paleopolis and Mon Repos area, including archaic temples and the famous Gorgon pediment from the temple of Artemis, now in the archaeological museum. After the decline of the Greek cities, Corfu passed into Roman hands in the 2nd century BC and, with the partition of the Empire, became part of the Byzantine world, of which it was a part for almost a thousand years, exposed to raids by Goths, Normans and pirates.
Here lies the key to understanding Corfu and all the Ionians, and what separates them from the rest of Greece. While practically the whole Greek world fell under the Ottoman Empire after the capture of Constantinople in 1453 and spent four centuries under Turkish rule, the seven Ionian islands took another path: they came under the Republic of Venice. Corfu gave itself to the Serenissima in 1386, seeking protection, and stayed Venetian until 1797, more than four centuries. That fact, unique in Greece, explains why Corfu looks more Italian than Greek.
Venice made Corfu a first-rate military bastion, the key to the Adriatic. It raised and reinforced the two great fortresses that still dominate the town, and with them the island withstood repeated and ferocious Ottoman sieges without ever falling: in 1537, in 1571 and above all in the great siege of 1716, when Turkish troops landed and surrounded the town. The defence, led by the German count Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg in Venetian service, held out against all odds until the Turks withdrew. Corfu was celebrated across Europe as the bulwark that halted Ottoman expansion westwards; the composer Antonio Vivaldi even wrote an oratorio in honour of that victory.
The Venetian legacy goes far beyond the walls. Venice gave Corfu its administrative language (for centuries Venetian and Italian were spoken and written here), its architecture of tall, colourful lanes, its music, its cuisine unique in Greece (pastitsada, sofrito) and even its landscape: to secure its supply of oil, the Venetians offered bounties to encourage olive planting, and so the island's mountains were covered with the more than three million olive trees that still characterise it. The local nobility organised itself in the Venetian manner, with its Golden Book, and the town became a refined cultural centre. While the rest of Greece lived under the Ottoman yoke, Corfu was a European city, Catholic and Orthodox at once, open to the Adriatic.
The end of Venice dragged Corfu into the European whirlwind. In 1797 the Treaty of Campo Formio, with which Napoleon wound up the Republic of Venice, handed the Ionians to revolutionary France. The French governed for barely two years, but they left a mark: they abolished feudal privileges, burned the nobility's Golden Book, planted the tree of liberty and began building the Liston, the elegant row of arcades imitating the rue de Rivoli in Paris that is today the town's open-air drawing room.
In 1799 a joint Russo-Ottoman fleet drove out the French, and in 1800 a remarkable experiment was born: the Septinsular Republic (Repubblica Settinsulare), the first semi-independent Greek state of the modern era, formed by the seven Ionian islands under the nominal protection of the Russian tsar and the Ottoman sultan, with Corfu as capital. It did not last long — the Treaty of Tilsit of 1807 returned the islands to Napoleonic France — but it was a foretaste of the idea of a Greek state of their own, decades before the country's independence.
After Napoleon's fall, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 placed the Ionians under a British protectorate, under the name United States of the Ionian Islands. For half a century (1815–1864) the British governed with a firm hand from Corfu through a high commissioner, and they left a very visible imprint: they built the Palace of St Michael and St George, the villa of Mon Repos, a system of aqueducts, much of the road network still in use, neoclassical buildings and even customs as British as cricket, which is still played on the esplanade, or the local ginger beer (tsitsibira). But Greek national feeling was growing, and in 1864, as a gesture towards the new King George I of Greece, Britain ceded the Ionians to the Greek kingdom. On 21 May 1864, Corfu and its sister islands finally joined Greece.
Now Greek, Corfu lived the 20th century between light and shadow. In 1923 it suffered a brief bombardment and occupation by Mussolini's Italy during what became known as the Corfu incident, resolved under international pressure. In the 1930s the island had a literary episode that would make it famous worldwide: the English Durrell family settled here between 1935 and 1939. The young naturalist Gerald Durrell immortalised that paradise childhood among creatures, tavernas and eccentric characters in 'My Family and Other Animals', and his brother, the writer Lawrence Durrell, portrayed the island in 'Prospero's Cell' from the White House at Kalami. Their books — and the television series 'The Durrells' — still draw visitors looking for the bright, bohemian Corfu of the interwar years.
The Second World War brought disaster. After the invasion of Greece the island was occupied first by the Italians and, after Italy's capitulation in September 1943, by the Germans, amid heavy fighting that caused destruction and fires in the town. But the darkest chapter came in June 1944. Corfu was home to an old and sizeable Jewish community, with Romaniote and Italian roots, with two synagogues and some 2,000 members living in the Jewish quarter (the Evraiki), next to the New Fortress.
On 9 June 1944, barely four months before the Germans withdrew from Greece, the Nazi authorities ordered all the island's Jews to gather in the main square of the old town and locked them in the Old Fortress. Between 11 and 15 June, close to 1,800 men, women and children were loaded onto three ships bound for the mainland and from there, by train, deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Almost none returned. Around 200 Corfiot Jews were saved by hiding with Christian families on the island. That deportation wiped out at a stroke a community that had lived in Corfu for centuries; today a small community, one surviving synagogue and several memorials keep its memory alive.
After the war and the postwar years, Corfu reinvented itself as one of the great tourist destinations of the Mediterranean. From the 1960s the beauty of its beaches, its climate and its heritage drew travellers from across Europe, and tourism became the island's engine, alongside olive oil and traditional farming. Today the Corfu of the northern and southern resorts — at times too crowded in high summer — lives alongside the cultured, elegant Corfu of the capital.
In 2007 the Old Town of Corfu was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, recognition of a unique urban ensemble that sums up six centuries of Venetian, French, British and Greek history in a single old town. Strolling its kantounia, having a coffee under the arcades of the Liston, climbing the fortresses at sunset or listening to the philharmonic bands (a local tradition inherited from the Ionian period) that play on the esplanade is touching that heritage with your own hands.
Corfu is also the natural gateway to the Ionian Islands and a crossroads between Greece, Italy and Albania: ferries leave its port for all three countries, and its airport connects it with half of Europe. Green, rainy and fertile, with more than three million olive trees, hundreds of stone villages and a cuisine no one else in Greece has, it stays true to what made it different: a Greek island that was never Ottoman, that always looked to the Adriatic and that made that mixture its identity.