Overview

Zakynthos, or Zante, had the misfortune of being hit by a series of earthquakes measuring around 7 on the Richter scale in 1953, right when Greece was really beginning its efforts to rebuild its economy and civil society after 10 years of war, occupation, famine, almost total destruction of its infrastructure and, finally, 4 years of bloody civil war. In those 10 years, 2.5 million people died of war and famine and the country was in ruins. The UN relief organizations were still here doing their work and the government had just devalued the drachma.

That was when the Ionian seismic fault line awoke, and, in 3 consecutive massive earthquakes, over 4 days, it left Zakynthos and Cefalonia a pile of burned ruins, never to recover their former grace and beauty. It is almost certain that, had those 3 tremors occurred today, massive amounts of reconstruction funds would have flowed from the Greek budget, the European Union, and the Greek immigrant communities worldwide to rebuild the stricken islands as they were before the earthquake.

In 1953, though, when the country was not even able to feed itself, there was hardly any thought of rebuilding Zakynthos to its pre-earthquake splendor; the primary concern was providing shelter not preserving architectural grace, and the main economic strategy was jump-starting commerce and agriculture, not rebuilding a traditional tourist attraction. Tourism was not even a glint in anybody's eye in 1953.

So, Zakynthos, the favorite island of the Venetians, the "Fiore di Levante" (the Flower of the East) of the Serene Republic, was lost forever, not only as far as architecture and grace but also in social terms, as a large number of the surviving members of the island's aristocracy fled it. The social effect of the tremors was to put an end to what was, until then, one of the few pockets of a western European-style bourgeois society on Greek soil, one that developed uninterrupted by Ottoman rule.