Captain Corelli Remembered
Published: Middletown Herald Record, 2000
Words: 1,097
By Cheetah Haysom

  The summer movie “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”, set on a Greek island during World War II, recalls events that were so much part of a Pine Island man’s childhood that he can see the Captain and hear his mandolin to this day.

  Jerry Kalogeratos was only 14 years old when “Captain Corelli” arrived on Cephalonia with the Italians forces which occupied the island in 1941. But he vividly remembers the Italian Captain who marched into town with a mandolin on his back – and played beautiful music during wartime discord and suffering.

  Kalogeratos, 74, an award winning cinematographer, who came to the U.S. in 1962, grew up on Cephalonia, the beautiful island that is the setting – some critics say it’s the star – of the epic romance. Nicholas Cage plays Captain Corelli, and Penelope Cruz is the Greek beauty whose love for Corelli is forbidden by loyalties imposed by war.

  The young Kalogeratos was an eye witness to many of the events in the film. The name “Captain Corelli” is fictional, but is, like much of the film, based on real lives and events.

  Kalogeratos points to his heart when he recalls the defiant resentment that Cephalonians felt towards the Italian authorities who led the occupation - specially since the Greeks had just defeated the Italian army in a brutal war in Albania.

  Provisions were scarce. Italian authorities purloined all the food on the island. Not even pet cats were safe. Greeks who were caught with-holding food, singing patriotic songs or keeping their national flag were promptly exiled.

  But there were two sides to the Italians. Kalogeratos remembers individual acts of compassion and gifts of food and medicine.

  “My family was hungry too. An Italian colonel came into the photography studio my father ran on the main street. He was served by my brother Giovanni. The colonel saw how thin Giovanni was and every day sent soldiers with bread from his breakfast for my brother.”

  After the Italian King surrendered to the Allied Forces in 1943, German troops overwhelmed the island with tanks, strafed the towns and rounded up their former allies. In one of the lesser known Nazi atrocities, Germans massacred at least 9,400 Italians – Kalogeratos says the figure is closer to 17,000. (The film shows the slaughter of only a few score Italian officers.)

  The horror of that massacre stayed with Kalogeratos all his life. “It’s one of those memories you never forget,” he said. In one incident, Kalogeratos recalls, a group of men were brought together and given dry biscuits. Then, hidden German gunmen opened fire and killed them all. “I saw with my own eyes the bodies of the 525 Italian soldiers, including a colonel and his dog.

  “During that time, Italians were just mown down everywhere. We heard the shooting going on from dawn to dusk for three, maybe four days. There were so many corpses they couldn’t bury them all. The smell of death was unbearable.”

  During the shooting on the island, other Italian troops were herded onto barges and told they were going home. “They were celebrating, they were so happy. The vessel was mined and 30 minutes later it blew up and they were all killed.”

  Kalogeratos’ family lived in Argostoli, but they fled to the countryside during the war - “first, when the Italians bombed us, then when the Germans bombed us, and then when the British bombed us.”

  What devastation of Cephalonia was not accomplished by the war was completed in 1953 when an earthquake, as depicted in the film, leveled the island. It killed Kalogeratos’s 20-year-old sister. He was in Rome, doing a course for professional photographers. He immediately got a ride home on an Italian Navy destroyer and arrived the following day. “Argostoli was flattened – I could see from one side of the city to other.

  “As I walked towards my home people I knew passed me and looked away – they knew my sister had been killed.” After the earthquake Kalogeratos’s family and most of the 70,000 inhabitants fled Cephalonia.

  War and nature have stripped Cephalonia of most of its physical antiquities, but the island’s folklore and mystic traditions persist - including the world renowned healing miracles by the island’s patron saint, Gerasimos, as shown in the film. (Gerasimos is so popular a name that Cephalonia was dubbed “The Island of the Gerry’s.” Indeed, Kalogeratos’s first name is Gerasimos.)

  Since the earthquake, Cephalonia has enjoyed almost 50 years of tranquillity. Many Cephalonions have returned and although the island is still unspoiled by development, there is growing prosperity.

  Some of that comes from tourism, thanks to the limelight cast on Cephalonia by the 1994 best-selling book, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin,” by British writer Louis de Bernieres. The novel, on which the film is based, has been translated into 18 languages.

  The film, shot on the island, has helped the economy, and although reviews for the movie have been mixed, ripples from its worldwide release are expected. The Terra Mare resort near the picturesque fishing town Luxouri names its poolside bar “Corelli’s”. A taverna in Luxouri claims “Corelli drank here”, and another bolder proprietor boasts “CORELLI IS IN HERE!” Souvenir shops at Argostoli airport sell the Greek liquor Ouzo in mandolin-shaped bottles.

  Kalogeratos, who studied at the Motion Picture Academy of Rome, and took lessons from the great Italian film director Frederico Fellini, sat in a cinema in Middletown a few days ago and watched director John Madden’s celluloid depiction of the searing memories of his Cephalonian childhood.

  He exclaimed in recognition at the opening scenes showing Italian paratroopers falling out of the skies over Argostoli – just as he remembered it as a child. Overall, Kalogeratos said, he was pleasantly surprised by how good the film was.

  Of course, he took issue with facts, omissions, geography, set, casting and costume details. But he was philosophical – “how much can you expect from a Hollywood movie?”

  An expansive, cheerful man, he was above all, delighted that Cephalonia’s history was being told. “The Greek communists don’t like the book – it makes them look like narrow thugs. But I’m glad young people are learning about our past.”

  It is a past he will share with his friend Barbara Lanza, the Pine Island artist and childrens' book illustrator. They met through a mutual Greek friend four years ago and last year he moved to Pine Island to live with her.

  This fall Kalogeratos will take Barbara to Cephalonia to meet it’s ghosts, myths, miracles and – so spectacular in the film - it’s rugged beauty, set in brochure-blue seas.

          Ends