IONIAN ISLANDS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 62, Issue 4378, 15 January 1941, Page 6

IONIAN ISLANDS

THEIR RETURN TO GREECE. “HISTORY’S MOST HANDSOME WEDDING PRESENT.” (By R.M.Y.) The war between Italy and Greece has again brought into the forefront of the news the lonian group of islands scattered down the west and south coasts of Greece. On the map they seem insignificant, but in reality they are of great strategic importance in the Mediterranean Sea. There are seven main islands, with thirty dependencies. The islands are: Corfu, Cephalonia, Cytheria (Cerigo), Ithica, Paxo, Santa Maura and Zante, with a total area of about 110 square miles and a population of 265,000. The history of the lonian Islands has been stormy and they have passed through the hands of many conquerors. A century ago they were possessed by Britain, and their return to Greece in 1864 represented an amicable settlement to a longstanding international dispute. All the group, with the exception of Cytheria, was included in the Roman Empire. In the 13th and 14th centuries the islands were a prey to corsairs and to Greek and Neapolitan claimants. In 1401, Corfu, the most northerly and the most important island of them all, fell into the hands of the Venetians, who, in the succeeding years, managed to extend their sway over the remainder of the group. After the fall of the Venetian republic in 1797, they were ceded to France.

But this brought no peace to the islands, for in the Napoleonic wars the islands were under siege. British forces, under General Oswalt, captured three of the groups in 1809, and the remaining four capitulated after Napoleon’s downfall. The settlement made in 1815 placed the entire group under British protection, and the British influence continued for nearly 50 years. As time went on, however, there was growing agitation on the islands for political union with Greece, and as it gained strength, peasant uprisings broke out and dissatisfaction became general.

NOMINATED KING. It hapened in 1862 that Otto, a Bavarian prince, who had been given the Greek throne in 1833, was deposed after an insurrection, and the British Government was asked by the provisional Government to name a successor to the vacant throne. Britain was anxious to have the Danish prince, William, as king, and in order ■io encourage his selection it offered the provisional Greek Government the lonian Islands in return for the acceptance of William. Prince William was accepted, and he became King George I. of Greece. The lonians were thereupon handed over as a wedding gift to the new king from Queen Victoria. On May 30, 1864, the British High Commissioner passed over the archives of state ito the Greek authorities, and on the following day he left Corfu with the English troops and men-of-war. A few days later George I. made his entry into the capital of the islands.

Last year a special series of stamps were issued by Greece to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the return of the islands, and one of the designs included portraits of George I. and Queen Victoria, side by side. It was the first and only time a British sovereign appeared on a postage stamp of a foreign country.