Corfu in the First World War

Corfu, a Greek island in the Ionian Sea at the entrance to the Adriatic, was the refuge of Serbia in exile in 1916–1918. In the winter of 1916 the Entente occupied it over the protests of Athens and shipped the remnants of the Serbian army there from Albania. Thousands of exhausted soldiers died on the islet of Vido, but the survivors regained their strength here and in the spring sailed for the front. The Serbian government sat on Corfu, a declaration on a common state of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was signed here in 1917, and the French fleet lay in its harbour.

A neutral island

Until 1864 Corfu, with the other Ionian Islands, was a British protectorate. When Britain handed them over to Greece, the powers proclaimed the “perpetual neutrality” of Corfu in the Treaty of London of 29 March 1864, and the King of Greece undertook to uphold it. General Ian Hamilton, later the commander at Gallipoli, was born on the island in 1853. From 1907 the Achilleion palace here belonged to Emperor Wilhelm II.

Receiving the Serbian army

In the autumn of 1915 Serbia was overrun by the Austrians, Germans and Bulgarians, and its army crossed the mountains of Albania in winter to the coast. The Allies considered Corsica, Tunisia and Algeria, but chose Corfu. The British journalist Gordon Gordon-Smith explained that the island lay only a few hours’ steaming from the Albanian ports, had a climate much like Serbia’s and was close to the future battlefield, in Albania or at Salonika.

On 10 January 1916 the Entente notified Greece of its plan, and on 11 January the French landed and raised the tricolour over the Achilleion. The government in Athens protested, citing the island’s perpetual neutrality, but the Entente did not give way. From mid-January the first Serbs arrived, and according to the French mission’s figures nearly 139 thousand soldiers and civilians had been brought to the island by 19 February.

The island of death

Corfu, which then had about 100 thousand inhabitants, was not ready for such crowds. It rained without a break, the Serbs had no tents, and the camps turned into a sea of mud. The gravely ill were taken to the islet of Vido at the entrance to the harbour of Corfu town. When there was no more room for graves in the rocky ground, the dead were sunk at sea. The Serbs called Vido “the island of death” and the waters around it “the Blue Tomb”. According to the French official history, 5400 Serbs died on Corfu between 29 January and the end of April; Serbian estimates reach about 10 thousand.

The army reborn and a government in exile

Most of the survivors, however, quickly recovered. The French built field bakeries and sent uniforms and weapons, and the army was reorganised into six infantry divisions and a cavalry division. In the spring of 1916 ships carried it to Salonika, from where in July it went back into battle. Gordon-Smith recorded that when the troops sailed, the Mayor of Corfu thanked them in a proclamation for their exemplary discipline: in four months the soldiers had committed no theft and had not cut down a single olive tree.

Left behind on the island were the Serbian government of Prime Minister Nikola Pašić, hospitals and about 10,000 men. In Corfu town the official gazette “Srpske novine” was published, Serbian schools were open, and in September 1916 the Serbian parliament met in the municipal theatre. On 20 July 1917 Pašić and Ante Trumbić, chairman of the Yugoslav Committee, signed here the Corfu Declaration, which announced a common kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes under the Karađorđević dynasty.

A naval base

Corfu was also the base of the French fleet, which guarded the exit from the Adriatic and kept the Austro-Hungarian fleet bottled up inside it. In March 1917 a German submarine sank the battleship Danton, which was returning to Corfu after a refit at Toulon. At the end of April the Allies met on the island for a naval conference to protect shipping in the Mediterranean better, and in the spring of 1918 the French began laying a net barrage against submarines from the islet of Fano, north-west of Corfu.

Remembrance

The Serbs stayed on Corfu until the end of the war, and in November 1918 Regent Alexander returned to liberated Belgrade. The island was left with 28 Serbian military cemeteries. In the 1930s the Serbs built a mausoleum on Vido, intended to hold the remains of soldiers from the cemeteries of the Ionian Islands and to commemorate those buried at sea. Every year a delegation from Serbia lays wreaths at the mausoleum and at sea, over “the Blue Tomb”.