Greek newspaper Kathimerini recently published the following report by Richard Pine who was voted “Critic of the Year” in the 2018 Irish Journalism Awards. He lives and works in Corfu, and is the author of “Greece Through Irish Eyes.”:
Lawrence Durrell described the condition of “islomania” as “a rare but by no means unknown affliction of the spirit” in people who find islands “irresistible.” He was describing the psychological compulsion which drives many writers, in particular, to try to satisfy an inner need. Durrell’s own “island books” include Corfu (where he discovered both Greece and himself), Rhodes and Cyprus. Today, we would call this “the tourist gaze,” the outsider wondering what it is like to be an insider.
Greece, with its hundreds of inhabited islands, and thousands uninhabited, offers a huge variety of unique island cultures. It’s been a perennial attraction for island-hopping backpackers and an early factor in the Greek tourist industry. It would be crazy to suggest that there is any single pen that could do justice to this spectrum of island lives.
The other side of the coin is the writer born and bred in an island community, such as Konstantinos Theotokis (Corfu, 1872-1923), Alexandros Papadiamandis (Skiathos, 1851-1911) and Nikos Kazantzakis (Crete, 1883-1957). It’s no accident that they all became pioneers of Greek writing and exponents of the Greek landscape and character. Their depictions of the mores, rhythm and syntax of island thought are never fully available to the visitor.
The outsider and the insider have quite different perspectives on the politics, aesthetics, ecology, economies and daily habits of an island. In Ireland, the case of John Millington Synge (the outsider) and Liam O’Flaherty (the insider) in the western island of Inishmore (the name would translate into Greek as “meganisi”) is a signal of this insider/outsider dichotomy.
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