Corfu, the island that fascinated poets and kings

The exceptional geographical position of Corfu determined, from the beginning, the role that the island was destined to play. Crossing point and meeting place of ideas and of human coexistence, melting pot of civilizations, managed to fuse together harmoniously the often-contradictory trends and to exhibit a cultural identity quite unique and different from the rest parts of Greece. The coexistance of Romans and Byzantines with locals, enriched with immigrants from southern Italy and Sicily, Venice and later France, England, Malta and other Mediterranean countries, fused together with Jews and waves of refugees from the Turk-occupied Greece and Crete (especially after the fall of Candia), makes the city a place of exemplary complexness, the multicultural character of which, is reflected on the arts and the lettered, on the social life of the city and suburbs.

The inclination of corfiots to the spectacles, the music and the opera is the result of the living history and coexists with the deepest respect for the national and religious symbols. The western style of the buildings and of the artistic expression, of the customs and the musical tradition constitutes the expression of the cultural osmosis of Corfu with the West. A procedure that, despite the predictions to the opposite, left the Eastern Greek Orthodox Dogma untouched, in times that the Eastern Christianity, in her historical borders, was either savagely oppressed or ceased to exit.