What Is Kefalonia Known For?

Kefalonia carries two very different kinds of history, one a natural disaster that reshaped the island physically, the other a wartime tragedy that later inspired one of the most widely read novels set in Greece.

Kefalonia is known first for the earthquake of August 12, 1953, a series of tremors reaching 7.3 on the Richter scale that destroyed nearly every village on the island, with the epicenter near its southern tip. Fiskardo, in the north, was the only settlement left largely intact, and its surviving Venetian harbor architecture still stands out from the rebuilt towns elsewhere on the island today. The disaster also caused significant emigration, as many residents left for the Greek mainland or abroad in the years that followed, and the same seismic activity that destroyed so much also opened the roof of what's now known as Melissani Cave, revealing an underground lake lit by sunlight through the collapsed ceiling.

Kefalonia is equally known for a darker chapter from a decade earlier. In September 1943, following Italy's armistice with the Allies, German forces executed soldiers of the Italian Acqui Division stationed on the island after they refused to turn their weapons on the Greek population, an event now commemorated at a small museum in Argostoli. That massacre later formed the historical backdrop for Louis de Bernières's novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, adapted into a 2001 film shot largely on the island, with scenes filmed around Sami, Antisamos Beach, and Fiskardo.

Kefalonia is also known for Mount Ainos, home to the Kefalonian fir found nowhere else on earth, and for its Robola wine region, connecting the island's earthquake history and wartime past to Zakynthos and Ithaca nearby, both shaken by the same 1953 disaster.