An earthquake in 1953 lifted the whole of Cephalonia 60 centimetres
In August 1953 a run of four earthquakes flattened almost every house on Cephalonia, the largest Ionian island. The strongest, magnitude 6.8, raised the entire island about 60 centimetres, and the old waterline is still visible on coastal rocks. Most residents then left to start over elsewhere.
The island sits just southeast of a major fault where the Eurasian and Aegean plates grind past each other, and local thrust faults keep pushing it upward. Its ancient history was busy too. From at least the 6th century BC four city-states, Pale, Cranii, Same and Pronnoi, minted their own coins. An islander called Melampous took the musical prize for singing with the lyre at Delphi in 582 BC, Pale sent 200 heavy infantrymen to face the Persians at Plataea, and all four cities sided with Athens in the Peloponnesian War, since the island guards the approach to the Gulf of Corinth.
Some scholars argue Cephalonia may be Homer's Ithaca. Robert Bittlestone's book Odysseus Unbound proposed that the Paliki peninsula was a separate island in the late Bronze Age, and a three-year project beginning in 2007 investigated the idea. Rome conquered Same in 189 BC after a long siege, and the emperor Hadrian later gave the island to Athens.
Byzantium used it as a base against Muslim raids, but after 1185 it passed to Norman and Italian counts, briefly to the Ottomans from 1479, and in 1500 to Venice, which held it until French troops arrived in 1797. Under Venice the island became one of the world's biggest currant exporters, and in 1596 the Venetians built Assos Castle. French, Russian-Ottoman and British rule followed; the British governor Charles de Bosset built the bridge across Argostoli bay still named after him. Calls for union with Greece grew, and in 1864 Britain handed the Ionian Islands to the new Greek king George I.
The Second World War brought tragedy. After Italy's armistice in September 1943, the Italian garrison fought the Germans rather than surrender its weapons; once defeated, about five thousand captured Italian soldiers were executed. Louis de Bernières drew on these events for Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Peace returned only in 1949 after the Greek Civil War.
Source: Cephalonia
