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SAKIS GEKAS
the prison and the poorhouse in Corfu were built and account for the large deficit he
left in the Treasury. No major construction works seem to have been carried out by
the British-Ionian authorities during the 1850s and any plans that officials devised
were seriously compromised by the rising deficit in state finances.
The roads built by British administrators such as Resident Napier in Kefalonia figure
prominently in arguments about the legacy of British rule in the Ionian Islands 60 .
Roads were constructed in the 1820s both in Corfu and Kefalonia, but they needed
maintenance; subsequent governments however did not carry this through, and infrastructure
improvements did not last. Reports dating from around thirty years after the
construction of roads in Kefalonia urged the central authorities to take action. Kefalas,
a local official in Kefalonia, stressed to the Resident of the island that the roads in the
Lixuri district had become impassable due to neglect; decay of the wooden bridges
that linked Lixuri with the country but also the villages with grapevines was extensive.
Growers submitted petitions highlighting that only traces of the original roads
could be discerned. Villagers from the Lixuri area complained that the sums they paid
in tax for road maintenance were wasted and they could neither reach their fields
regularly for work nor use carts to bring back their produce or animals 61 .
The already strained financial resources of the Ionian State deteriorated for other
reasons, further eroding its ability to govern effectively. Revenue collection failed to
improve during the period because of smuggling. In 1859 Commissioner Young argued
that the unguarded coasts and ports of several of the islands rendered hopeless
any attempts to improve revenue, a situation that was fiscally unsound as well
as ‘demoralising’. At the same time, the cost of some public establishments was
alarmingly high, in relation of course to the fiscal capabilities of the state. Young
noted that ‘the Foundling Hospital at Zante costs a sum of £2,282 annually, being
more than the third of the whole Municipal Revenue. It is not to be wondered at,
that a Municipality complains of poverty when the third of its moderate revenue is
devoted to rearing the illegitimate children of the population’ 62 .
The comments of the High Commissioner on the Foundling Hospital of Zante
speak of corruption and maladministration of funds but fail to address the actual
lack of funds for the Municipal Authority of Zante. If less than £7,000 was allocated
for the needs of the whole island it is clear how far removed, financially at least, the
central administration in Corfu was; as a result the state of public establishments in
all islands deteriorated after years of under-funding. From the 1840s onwards the
government funded public works with increased borrowing from the Ionian Bank,
established in 1839. The building of hospitals, piers, prisons and roads (to some extent,
from the 1840s onwards) and drainage projects were all financed with loans
from the bank 63 . From its earliest days the Ionian Bank lent increasingly to the
60 Moschopoulos, 1988, p. 76.
61 Arxeio 421, Doc 2, K.B., 11 and 12 November 1857.
62 IIGG, 441, 28 November/10 December 1859.
63 P. L. Cottrell, The Ionian Bank. An Imperial Institution, 1839-1864, Athens: Alpha Bank
Historical Archives, 2007, p. 200.
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