Originalkarte der Insel Korfu auf Grund der Englischen Aufnahme und nach eigenen Untersuchungen entworfen u. gezeighnet von Prof J. Partsch.

Description

This map of Corfu, drawn by Professor Joseph Partsch and published by Justus Perthes in Gotha as Supplementary Volume 55 of Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, represents one of the most comprehensive cartographic treatments of the island produced in the nineteenth century. At a scale of 1:100,000, it combines the English military surveys conducted during the British Protectorate (1815–1864) with Partsch’s own fieldwork, producing a document that synthesizes half a century of accumulated geographical knowledge and presents it through the exacting standards of late-nineteenth-century German scientific cartography.

Three inset maps accompany the main survey: a geological map of the island in color, a detailed plan of the town of Corfu (Kerkyra/Korkyra), and a population growth map tracking demographic change from 1766 to 1878. The map was published twenty-three years after Corfu and the Ionian Islands were formally ceded to Greece — a transfer that ended nearly five centuries of consecutive foreign rule — and reflects the new Greek state’s integration into European geographical scholarship.

The Map in Detail

The main map presents the island in full hachured relief, its dramatic topography rendered with care — the high ridge of Mount Pantokrator dominating the northern half, the narrowing southern peninsula tapering to its tip, the deeply indented eastern coast facing the Albanian shore and the Greek mainland. Settlements are differentiated by type and size; churches, monasteries, roads, and footpaths are each given their own symbol, explained in the Zeichen- und Schrift-Erklärung at center left. The island’s administrative structure is laid out in the Politische Einteilung key, dividing Corfu into three Eparchies — Kerkyras, Messi, and Oros — and thirteen Dimes, their boundaries marked on the map. Roman numerals identify each administrative unit across the landscape. The small island of Vido (S. Nicolo) appears off the town harbor; Mouse Island (Pontikonisi) is shown to the south. The Albanian coast, Plataria Bay, and the small satellite islands of Prasudi and Syviota are included to provide geographical context.

The upper right carries two insets: a colored geological map identifying the island’s rock formations by type and age, with a full legend in German; and immediately below it, a detailed town plan of Korfu / Korkyra at larger scale, showing the street layout, the twin fortresses, the Esplanade, the harbor, and the principal public buildings. The lower left presents the population map — Zunahme der Bevölkerung von 1766–1878 — using color gradations to show rates of demographic growth across the island’s communes over more than a century, a thematic exercise characteristic of the analytical ambitions of Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen.

Historical Context

Corfu’s cartographic history before this map was largely a product of its political captivity. Venetian for four centuries (1386–1797), then briefly French, then British from 1815 under the Protectorate of the United States of the Ionian Islands, the island had been surveyed primarily by foreign military engineers for strategic purposes. The British surveys — which Partsch explicitly acknowledges in his title (auf Grund der Englischen Aufnahme, based on the English survey) — were the most systematic ever conducted on the island, carried out during the protectorate decades and forming the triangulation framework on which all subsequent mapping depended. When Britain ceded the Ionian Islands to Greece in 1864, as a gesture of goodwill toward the new Greek king George I, the surveys passed with the territory. Partsch’s contribution was to revisit and update this inherited data with his own investigations, integrate it with the geological and demographic knowledge accumulated since the British surveys were made, and present the result in the format and to the standards of Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen — the preeminent geographical periodical of the era, founded by August Heinrich Petermann in 1855 and published by Justus Perthes in Gotha, whose supplementary volumes set the benchmark for scientific cartography in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Publication History and Census

Prof. Dr. Joseph Partsch (1851–1925), cartographer; Justus Perthes, publisher; Gotha, 1887. Published as Ergänzungsheft Nr. 55 to Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, accompanying Partsch’s monograph Die Insel Korfu of the same year. Partsch was professor of geography at Breslau and a leading figure in German physical geography; his work on Corfu remained the standard geographical treatment of the island for decades. Issued folded.