Zakynthos Town from the castle hill of Bochali

Zakynthos · History

From Fiore di Levante to the 1953 earthquake

An island named in Homer, four centuries of Venice, a British protectorate, union with Greece in 1864, and a town rebuilt after the earthquake of 1953.

Timeline

The story of Zakynthos

Antiquity
Homer's wooded Zakynthos
Homer counts Zakynthos among the islands of Odysseus's kingdom and calls it wooded. In the classical age it was allied with Athens, and Herodotus wrote about the pitch drawn from its lake near Keri. Rome took the island in 191 BC.
Byzantine era
Raids from the sea
Under Byzantium the island was raided again and again, by the Vandals in the 5th century, by Arab fleets and later by Norman adventurers. Its people built their villages inland and on the hills, as Keri and Volimes still are today.
1484–1797
Fiore di Levante
Venice took the island in the 1480s and held it until 1797. It called Zakynthos the flower of the East, fortified the hill of Bochali, and the town grew rich on currants and olive oil. The island's painters, the Ionian School, mixed Byzantine icons with Italian art.
1797–1864
French, Russians and British
After the fall of Venice came the French, then the Septinsular Republic under Russian and Ottoman protection, then the French again. The British took the island in 1809, and from 1815 the Ionian Islands were a British protectorate. Zakynthos joined Greece with the other Ionian Islands in 1864.
1943–1953
Courage and catastrophe
In 1943 the mayor, Loukas Karrer, and Bishop Chrysostomos refused to give the occupiers a list of the island's Jews, and by many accounts all 275 survived. Ten years later, on 12 August 1953, an earthquake and fire destroyed almost all of the town.
1953 to today
A rebuilt town and a protected bay
The town was rebuilt in the old style, with arcades and bell towers. From the 1980s tourism grew fast, Laganas became a party resort, and in 1999 the National Marine Park of Zakynthos was founded to protect the turtles of the same bay.