Durrell Island

The Durrell brothers spent happy years on Corfu and now a school offers learning holidays in their name.

“You have two birth-places,” wrote Lawrence Durrell, the Anglo-Irish author best known for his experimental novel, The Alexandria Quartet, “you have the place where you were really born and then you have a place of predilection where you really wake up to reality.” Many philhellenes can say this about Greece, this ancient Mediterranean land, a true “palimpsest” (to borrow from Kazantzakis) of history and culture. What is this thing that links a person to another place? Is it a simple desire to learn about foreign things, or is it something much deeper, an ancestral memory?

Whatever the case, when tourists become travellers and when travellers feel they’ve made a connection to a foreign place, they seek more than just a good holiday, a traditional meal and a fun nightlife. Organisations like the Durrell School of Corfu which make learning the central focus of their holiday programs are popping up all over Greece. Indeed, for the people at the Durrell School there was really no “perfect place to establish and nurture a school about the Durrell brothers than on their beloved island of Corfu”.

The two brothers have left an intangible legacy in the air of Corfu (Kerkyra, in Greek). Lawrence and Gerald Durrell moved there with their mother in 1935, in fact, Lawrence found little to keep him in England and spent most of his life elsewhere. An entertaining account of growing up on the isle can be read in Gerald’s 1956-book My Family and Other Animals, where he says it was, “rather like living in one of the more flamboyant and slapstick comic operas”. For Gerald, Corfu was the place where the “world turned from black to white to technicolour”.

The school is keen on providing a memorable learning experience in a location rich in history and culture by way of the issues that were significant to the Durrell brothers. Philhellenes (and phil-Durrells) travel to Corfu to partake of this unique opportunity from as far as the USA, Canada and Australia, but also from the UK, India, France, Ireland and Holland.

While this year’s program was originally cancelled due to the “current geopolitical conflicts”, it has since been deferred to midsummer 2004, from June 12 through to 26. It’s certainly a program to look forward to– two weeks packed with food tasting, field trips, discussions on linguistic, social and political issues as well as entertainment via the Karagiozi shadow puppet theatre. An impressive faculty from around the world, public and academic experts (including Nicholas Gage, bestselling author of Eleni) in the arts but also the sciences, participate in all daily activities and lead discussions.

Despite the uncertainly of travel however, a shorter revised program will go ahead this June (18-24), where fieldtrips to Episkepsi, Old Peritheia, Loutses, Paxos and Kalami (to see the house where the brothers lived) will be intertwined with discussions and analysis of topics such as “Reading Cultural Landscapes”, “Globalisation and Nationalism”, “Translation” and “Postcolonialism”. Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book will also be the centre of a discussion on “Writing Against The Grain”.

This mixture of field experiences and table-based discussion tunes into the legacy of the brothers—Gerald was a renowned zoologist and keen conservationist and Lawrence, a master of the written word, a thinker who brought in his natural affiliation with Eastern philosophies (the brothers were born in India) to the struggles and journeys of his Western heroes.

The idea of the journey is central to the school’s programs. After all, people from all over the world travel to a unique island to learn, ultimately, about themselves, their relationship to each other via their keen interest in the brothers Durrell, enriched by the vivid surroundings. And we suspect, as Durrell keenly observed in his Black Book, “There is only trial and error on a journey like this, and no signposts.”

[First published in Greece Now.]