No one ever spoke about him.
As if he never existed.
History has always taken care, except for the usual things, to spend many hours in front of the mirror removing the bothersome blemishes on her face.
His name is barely mentioned.
"Graseti : Corfiot, collaborator of the atheist French terrorists in Corfu during 1797"
Young Mikelis was taken in off the streets, by Konstantis Grasetis, a furniture maker in Porta Remounda.
They had no children so he was adopted.
He was home tutored and taken to work with his stepfather.
In 1797 Mikelis Graseti was thirty years old and one of the few young men in Corfu who knew how to read and write.
Upon the arrival of the French Republicans in Corfu he was the first to enlist in the "People's Militia" formed by the French and became the first Jacobin in the Ionian Islands.
He became chairman of the first appointed temporary Municipal Council to exist, which was installed in that most sacrosanct of spaces for the local nobility, the Gallery of Nobles, the Loggia dei Nobili, which is known today as the San Giacomo (Old Town Hall)
In this Municipal Council all members came from the lower/popular classes
The Jewish community was represented by five members and as well as disciples of all other faiths.
The first female municipal council member was Marousa Apalira of Andriolos, a twenty year old gipsy girl from Mandouki, where many gipsies had arrived and resided having been exiled by the Catholic Church of Spain.
The idea of a Municipal Council at the time was unimaginable.
Authority was held up to then generally by the Venetians and in everyday life by the armed gangs of the nobles.
This temporary government began to legislate and started by confiscating all the church property, Orthodox as well as Catholic.
The first public and free-of-charge school was founded at St. Francis church.
The first student to enroll was Marousa Apalira.
The first municipal library was created in the church of Holy Mary of Tenedos with books collected by French soldiers.
The first municipal printing press opened in the Annunciata monastery and the first papers were printed as well as decisions of the council in the form of wall newspapers.
The first municipal and free-of-charge Infirmary began to operate (probably) in Agios Ioannis.
These changes were unthought of for the society of those times, so much so, that there is nothing they can be compared to today. Only if someone could see with the eyes of that era, could it be understood.
In essence the foundations of the new bourgeois democracy were being laid by the French revolution which still retained a plebeian character.
These changes created a great shock to the existing feudal society. The nobles gangs started murdering Councillors family members.
In the winter of 1798 all councillors had lost someone from their family.
These brought on a reaction by the Corfiot Jacobins as well as the French republicans.
In one night the Municipal Council resigned and was replaced by a revolutionary commitee.
The same night they went to the houses of the nobles and collected all the titles and mortgages through which the nobles retained control.
They gathered them in a pile at the spot where Pentofanaro is today and burned them.
They then arrested members of the most hated noble families and hung them from the arches of the Liston.
They left the bodies hanging there for days in order to rot.
The reason was not anger, as anyone might imagine, but something much more important.
The people of those times did not simply believe the nobles were just rich, but that they were... another species.
The people had to be convinced by seeing with their own eyes that nobles die and rot just the same as everyone else.
In 1799 The Tsar and the Sultan allied together and sent a fleet to bring back order to the islands.
Admiral Ouzakov and his fleet besieged the French and the Corfiot Jacobins holed up in the Old Fortress and following six months of negotiations with the French government allowed them to get on the ships and leave.
The road towards the collapse of the Feudarchy had been opened however and the political movements of the next period of the Septinsular republic sealed its fate.
Mikelis Grasetis and Marousa Apalira left with the ships.
Their relatives all killed and their names lost from the island.
I searched and found many "Graseti" surnames along the coasts of the Adriatic, in Italy as well as Croatia.
A few dozen Corfiots and me signed a petition and sent it to the municipal council
We were asking for a monument to be erected at Pentofanaro in memory of the French Republicans and the Corfiot Jacobins.
Everyone said yes, but the petition was never brought to a council meeting.
One line was left in the History books
"Graseti": Corfiot, collaborator of the atheist French terrorists in 1797"
PS
The historical facts about the two year period the French Republicans were here was collected by Panagiotis Peristeris over many arduous years.
Corfu Saturday the 26th of November
Stamatis Kyriakis
PS2 I translated this article from the original Greek, as written by Stamatis. Any mistakes are mine!!
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