Sunday Whatever – The Deserted Painting by Michael Bloor

This is an account of a beguiling little puzzle, beguiling to me at any rate.. All the facts known to myself are set out below. A possible explanation is then offered. I would very much welcome any alternative solutions that suggest themselves to LS readers.

The mystery lies in Mathraki, a small Greek island off the north coast of the large Greek island of Corfu. Back in May, Doreen and I were on holiday in Corfu, staying in a village called Agios Stefanos. The harbour there is a base for a small ferry to the three tiny Diapontia Islands – Mathraki, Othoni, and Erikoussa. We fancied a day out on the nearest, Mathraki, a 50-minute boat trip. Beforehand, we’d gathered that Mathraki wasn’t really a tourist destination: there’s only one village, one small hotel, and three tavernas; it’s home to around three hundred souls.

We disembarked at the harbour and had a coffee at the harbour taverna. The village, like a lot of villages in the Greek islands, is located up in the hills (an historical protection against pirates). As it was a hot day, we decided we’d stroll along the coast a couple of miles down to the southern tip of the island, for lunch at the hotel there. The dirt road along the shore was completely deserted: no traffic, no houses once we’d left the harbour behind, just the beach and the sea to our left, and steep, pineforested hillsides to our right.

About a mile down that dirt road was where we saw it. Above the high-water mark on the beach, a few yards from the road, were the wrecked remains of an old wooden Greek fishing boat. All the wooden hull had disappeared apart from one piece, still attached to one of the three remainig wooden ribs – the piece was about four feet by three feet.

On that last piece of hull, someone had painted, in oils, an elaborate and exquisite portrait of The Rialto in Venice. The artist had even taken advantage of a gaping hole in the centre of the wood to represent the canal under The Rialto Bridge. It was a fine painting, the result of much labour. But it was now rather dilapidated; we guessed it might have been out in all weathers for maybe a couple of years.

There was no house nearby, no marker, no plaque – just a wreck sitting on the beach with an intricate painting on what was left of its hull. In the UK, an anonymous artist called ‘Banksy’ has, for many years, secretly produced public works of art in various public places. But this was no work by a Greek Banksy: there was no public to view this decaying painting on the deserted shore.

We walked on a further half-mile or so to the small hotel. The young couple who were running it were friendly and hospitable (we were in Greece, afterall). I forget what Doreen ordered, I had some fresh-caught sardines. We might’ve asked the couple if they knew the story of the painting. But we didn’t. Perhaps that was because we were still savouring the mystery.

So much for the facts. Below is my attempt to provide a plausible backstory for the painting.

***

My guess is that the roots of the Mathraki Mystery may lie in the historical past. Corfu and the associated Diapontia islands (Mathraki, Othoni, and Ereikoussa) have been governed by a bewildering range of rulers. From the fourteenth century, Corfu was held by the Venetians; heavily fortified, it withstood several sieges by the Ottoman Turks. At the end of the eighteenth century, Napoleon abolished the Venetian Republic and so Corfu was then briefly occupied by the French. After the fall of Napoleon, the British took over in 1815 (and introduced the Corfiots to cricket), handing the islands over to the  newly founded Greek State in 1864. Mussolini seized Corfu in 1923, claiming that, since the islands had been Venetian for over 500 years, the islands should properly be part of his new Italian Empire. He required the schools to teach the Italian language and encouraged Italian settlers. When the Mussolini government collapsed in 1943, the Germans took over, massacring many of the Italian garrison. The islands were liberated by British commandos in 1944. Greek partisans, broadly split between monarchists and communists, then fought a bitter civil war across the mainland and the islands, including among other atrocities, the wholesale kidnapping of children. The civil war lasted until 1949.

Greek villagers have a well-deserved reputation for kindly hospitality. But it’s easy to see that with a history like that, feuds between families could linger on into the millenium. It’s possible that the Mathraki artist was from a local family – perhaps descended from an Italian immigrant who had arrived on the island in the Mussolini era? or perhaps descended from a guerilla who had fought on the ‘wrong’ side in the civil war? a descendent who perhaps had even been implicated in the kidnapping of local children?? There are plenty ways in which bad blood could remain over the generations, particularly on a small isolated island.

If the artist had indeed grown up in a family which was part of an inter-generational village feud, it is likely that he or she would’ve sought employment elsewhere. A favoured career for many Greek islanders has long been the mercantile marine. Such a choice would be even more likely if the family had once owned the wrecked wooden fishing boat that has lain beached for so many years on the deserted shore: the children of fishing families often go to sea in cargo ships.

There are quite a lot of Greek shipping companies, most of them are family-owned, and most of those families are from Chios, a Greek island just offshore from Turkey. It’s about 500 miles from Mathraki to Chios; the dialects of the two islands are widely different. If our artist was working for a Chiot family business, he would have found it pretty difficult to progress to a senior position, recruitment being known to favour fellow Chiots. Yet at the start of his career, he would found he had plenty of idle time to develop leisure interests. In the 1960s, before the development of containerised shipping, crews might spend a week or more idling in port while their vessel was unloading and/or loading. From the 1980s onwards, technological advances like automated enginerooms drove substantial reductions in crewing levels, but prior to the 80’s seafarers often had a fair amount of leisure time at sea as well.

So my guess is that our anonymous artist is a retired merchant seaman, now in his seventies or his eighties. During his time at sea, he developed an interest in painting; he had a talent which he further developed on retirement. He might have been an officer rather than an ordinary seamen, but he never rose to a senior post. He never had sufficient savings to retire to anywhere other than his native place. His family may have found themselves on the wrong side in Greece’s 1940s Civil War, but I think it more likely that he was of Italian descent.

On his retirement, he probably found the embers of old feuds still glowing in the village. Perhaps he himself was not the sort of person to try and patch up old quarrels. An isolated, lonely, old man, he chose a quixotic method of defiance. In 2020 or thereabouts, he painted a picture of a very famous Italian bridge, located in the city that ruled Mathraki for five hundred years. And he painted it on a piece of property that was indisputably his own, the wreck of his family’s old fishing boat.

Other solutions may be available.

Michael Bloor