Where Venice once ruled

Rich, resourceful and ruthless, the Venetians left handsome imprints across the Greek world, says Matthew Dennison, as he explores the lingering traces of a vanished empire

- 

FROM the Ionian Sea past the furthest reaches of the Mediterranean to the Istrian peninsula, from the Albanian coast to the shores of modern Montenegro, from Crete to Cephalonia stretched the empire of the Venetian Republic in its heyday more than 500 years ago. For centuries, Venetian galleys plied the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Trade demanded ports of call and free movement across seaways: colonisation followed Venice's merchants.

In her wake, she exported concrete evidence of her overlordship: the lion of St Mark carved boldly into granite walls of far-flung fortifications; on island hillsides rambling villas, like the homes of minor gentry in the Veneto, part-hidden by slopes of vines and olives; and in a sheltered bay of Messenia, close to the fashionable resort of Costa Navarino, the Roman Catholic Church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour, transformed by Venetian conquerors late in the 17th century from a terracottaroofed mosque. On the island of Crete, Gothic painting, Venetian style, changed religious imagery once influenced by Constantinople, and, in the 16th and 17th centuries, patterns of Venetian lace were reworked in boldly coloured embroidery on the flowing linen-cotton skirts of Cretan countrywomen. Across the Greek world, medieval and early-modern Venice -rich, resourceful and ruthless-left handsome imprints. Many remain visible today.

Cartoonist and architectural historian Osbert Lancaster was attached to the British Embassy in Athens at the end of the Second World War.