Corfu

Lovely Corfu, green and sun-drenched with its indented shores, a mythical, fascinating island, first appeared on the scene at the dawn of time when she gave refuge to Jason and the Argonauts on their return from their quest for the Golden Fleece.

The description of "the island of the Phaeacians" in the Odyssey, Odysseus' last stop before arriving in his beloved Ithaca, is among the most beautiful verses in world literature.

The incomparable beauty of the island, which appears from time to time under other names, attracted a host of would-be conquerors.

It also inspired artists of every kind, who praised its charms in words and music or rendered them in paintings, sculptures on engravings, spreading its renown to a wide public over the past few centuries.

Literary figures such as Goethe, Oscar Wilde, Gerald and Lawrence Durrell, the painters, Alfred Sisley and Edward Lear, immortalized with their pen or palette Corfu 's inimitable enchantment.

Even the great Napoleon was not unmoved by its beauty.

It was here that the sensitive empress Elizabeth of Austria erected the Achilleion, the palace she viewed as the solace of her soul, while according to Lawrence Durrell, Prospero's island in The Tempest is modelled on Shakespeare's notion of Corfu.

Corfu was the birthplace of Greece's first governor, Ioannis Kapodistrias, of the composer Nikolaos Mantzaros (who set to music Solomos's "Hymn to Liberty", the country's national anthem), of the writers Polylas, Markoras, Mavillis, and Constantine Theotokis, as well as being a source of inspiration to Greece's national poet, Dionysios Solomos.