2 - UNESCO: World Heritage

JUSTIFICATION FOR INSCRIPTION
Criterion ii. It exhibits an important interchange of human values, over a span of time or within a
cultural area of the world, on developments in architecture or technology,
monumental arts, town planning or landscape design
From an early date, the extraordinary geographical position of Corfu in the Mediterranean determined the
historical role it would play throughout the ages. A crossroads between peoples, a place of encounter and
coexistence, it was also an environment in which ideologies became acclimatized, a melting pot of cultures that
managed to mingle harmoniously in even their most difficult contacts and exchanges.
In a manner that is unique, the 8 th century city of Corinthian colonists became Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine,
Angevin, Venetian, French, British and Greek. The ground preserves traces left by all these peoples either on
the surface or just a few metres below. Thanks to archaeological excavation and good fortune, one can now
visit the city of the Corinthian colonists, as well as their harbour, the archaeological remains of all the cultures
that pre-dated them. One can see the agora of the city that inspired Thucydides about the pathology of war,
Hellenistic and Roman city, with its special penchany for the theatre and games, the early Christian city with its
impressive churches and venerable relics of its patron saints, the city that knew Gothic incursions, Byzantine
campaigns of reconquest, Norman campaigns as these ‘People of the North’ infiltrated the East, the city that
was efficiently administered by the Venetians who perpetuated Byzantine landownership but respected the
Jews, that French enlightenment that overturned age-old social structures, the British administration that led
the city from its medieval character to the Neo-Classicism that is evident in the façades of the town today, while
leaving untouched its labyrinthine interior layout.
Throughout history, if rivalries existed among the communities that established themselves in Corfu, whether
defined by religion or race, they never led to armed racial conflict, or reached the point of racial hatred,
certainly never to extermination. Unto this day Corfu has never known racial, political or religious hatred. Today
the old town of Corfu is an open air museum of cultures, a composite of different cultural traditions that has
never been tainted by intolerance.
A sequence of different human establishments, each with co-existing with and contradictory cultural spheres—
Byzantium, Venice, France, Great Britain and other Mediterranean powers—were interwoven over the course
of their historical presence in Corfu, making the city a paradigm of cultural synthesis. And they did this together
with the Jews and the waves of refugees from Turkish-held mainland Greece and Crete, after the fall of Candia
in 1669. This cultural synthesis is expressed in the city’s architecture, social life, painting, sculpture, icon
painting and music.
The western-influenced style of the buildings, the survival of customs (such as the processions, window
decorations with scarlet fabrics known as damaschi, banners, Easter celebrations, Carnival), the artistic
flowering of the 18 th and 19 th century, the cultural foundations, the musical tradition, particularly lyric opera, are
all tangible expressions of this process of osmosis from the West that went on in Corfu and only though this
prism can we today approach contemporary social and cultural realities.
The Old Town of Corfu Nomination for inclusion on the World Heritage List
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