What Is Corfu Known For?

Corfu holds the only cricket pitch in Greece, a detail that traces directly back to a period of British rule most visitors don't expect from an island otherwise shaped by Venetian and French influence.

Corfu is known first for that British legacy. After Venice's long rule ended, the island passed briefly through French and Russian control before coming under British protection in 1815. The British built roads, founded the Ionian Academy, considered the first university of modern Greece, and introduced cricket, a sport that took root well enough to survive to this day, decades after the Ionian Islands were formally united with Greece through the Treaty of London in 1864. Mon Repos Palace, built in 1828 by British Commissioner Sir Frederick Adam, later became the birthplace of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, adding a real royal connection to that colonial period.

The island is equally known for the Achilleion Palace, built in Gastouri in 1890 for Empress Elisabeth of Austria, widely known as Sisi. Devastated by the death of her son Rudolf the previous year, the Empress sought refuge on Corfu and built the neoclassical palace as a tribute to Achilles and Greek mythology, filling its gardens with statues and classical imagery. After her assassination in Geneva in 1898, the palace passed to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and it survived both World Wars before eventually being restored and opened to the public.

Corfu Town's own architecture reflects that same layered history, and the Palace of St. Michael and St. George stands as the only purely Georgian-style building constructed anywhere outside the United Kingdom, connecting Corfu's colonial and aristocratic past to Paxos and Antipaxos nearby.