The Byzantine art museum, housed in an Orthodox Church, made a similar point: mostly 16th<\/sup>\u00a0through 18th<\/sup>\u00a0century icons, the early ones were painted The two forts , built by the Venetians, indicated the importance of Corfu as a No wonder this is a major stop for cruise ships, and for tourists who want warm (now hot!) summers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cosmopolitan Corfu If you enter Greece from the north, by sea, you\u2019re likely to visit the island of Corfu, Greece\u2019s most northern island, and the 7th\u00a0largest of the 1000 islands that comprise the \u201cGreek Isles.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s also one of the most unusual, partly because of its \u201cmodern\u201d history.\u00a0\u00a0Venetian from the fall of Constantinople in the 4th\u00a0Crusade … Continue reading “Cosmopolitan Corfu”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eastern-mediterranean-2013"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3014"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8365,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3014\/revisions\/8365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/files\/2013\/08\/360px-Achilles_in_Corfu.jpg\")
<\/a>Part of that history was reflected in what we saw ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/files\/2013\/08\/corfuachelion.jpg\")
<\/a>today.\u00a0\u00a0Carolyn and I chose the tour of the Achilleon, the palace built by the young and beautiful wife of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria\/Hungary.\u00a0 \u00a0Elizabeth, better known as \u201cSissy,\u201d was a member of the Bavarian Royal House, who fought depression especially after she learned Franz was having numerous affairs.\u00a0\u00a0She fled home, but returned on the condition that she be given a great deal of autonomy.\u00a0\u00a0Thus, she built a palace here in Corfu, which was devoted to her fascination with Achilles.\u00a0\u00a0Our guide, a Corfuite (?) with a strong British accent, enthusiastically described the statues and paintings, and regaled us with tales, long forgotten, of the Trojan War (I\u2019ll bet most of our tour crowd had read the Iliad and the Odyssey in college; I did). The extra treat for me was that when she died (assassinated in Switzerland in 1898 by a\u00a0\u00a0crazed socialist), Franz Joseph sold the estate to his good friend, Kaiser Wilhelm II.\u00a0\u00a0The Kaiser\u2019s contribution was to put an enormous statue of Achilles at the point where he could see it as he sailed in on his yacht, the Hohenzollern; it\u2019s still there, but missing is his (so typical of the Kaiser) sign, \u201cA great warrior, built by the Great Emperor of the Germans,\u201d which lasted until Allied soldiers, recuperating in World War I when Achilleon was a hospital, took it down.<\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a>I went as well to the Museum of Asian Art, tantalized by the fact that there WAS an Asian art museum on the island of Corfu.\u00a0\u00a0I read that it had 10000 artifacts.\u00a0\u00a0I wasn\u2019t told that the building was itself worth seeing.\u00a0\u00a0The collection is housed in the Palace of St. George and St. Michael, which it turned out, was built by the British High Commissioner as residence and administrative center when the island was part of the Ionian islands protectorate of Great Britain (1815-1864).\u00a0\u00a0The palace had his throne room\u2014if you can believe that the High Commissioner had a throne!\u2014and the furnishings of a neoclassical building.\u00a0\u00a0The Asian collection was interesting as well, with the collection coming from the 19th<\/sup> century ambassador from Greece to Austria, who purchased the items in auctions in Vienna.\u00a0\u00a0The explanations were intriguing in their connection between Greece and Asia.\u00a0\u00a0For example, the exhibit on Buddhist sculptures dealt with Gandahar, an early period that originated in the parts of India where successors to <\/a>(Greek) Alexander the Great ruled.\u00a0\u00a0The Buddhist statues resembled Apollo or Dionysus, with togas that could be in a Greek temple.\u00a0\u00a0The more I looked at the Buddhist statues, the clearer the connection became.\u00a0\u00a0The other link was between Chinese cloisonn\u00e9 and Byzantium.\u00a0\u00a0After the fall of Constantinople, many Byzantine artists fled to Armenia and Georgia, where their art made it on the Silk Road to China, giving rise to the art form every visitor of China today recognizes.<\/p>\n<\/a>by artists who were from Crete, where many artists had fled after the Turkish conquest of Byzantium.\u00a0\u00a0Later icons were painted by Cretans who had fled to Corfu after Crete fell to the Turks.\u00a0\u00a0The latest icons showed the influence of the Venetians, who ruled Corfu for over 400 years, and revealed additions of the Baroque period.<\/p>\n<\/a>military and naval outpost, particularly effective in <\/a>turning back the Turkish navy, then the French attacking British interests in the Mediterranean, and finally, the British protecting the Mediterranean supply lines to India.\u00a0\u00a0The fort has the lion of St. Marks, then the barracks of the British, and now houses the Ionian University Department of Music.\u00a0\u00a0For good measure, there is a small museum with relics from a Byzantine church that was on the site.<\/p>\n