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John Elkington

John Elkington

A world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development.

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Surprised By Cervantes In Nafpaktos

John Elkington · 14 March 2020 · Leave a Comment

Post 4 of 7

Statue of Cervantes, with broken sword
Looking the other way, towards the ill-fated Giorgos Anemogiannis
The Rio-Antirrio bridge from the ferry, as we head into the Peloponnese

Not quite the last person I expected to bump into in Greece, but close to it, was Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. But there he was standing inside the ramparts in Nafpaktos, in bronze effigy. Waving.

Then I recalled reading decades ago that he took part in the Battle of Lepanto, just offshore from Nafpaktos (formerly known as Lepanto) – receiving three gunshot wounds for his trouble.

He would later quip that, “The loss of my left arm is for the greater glory of my right.” The right arm that, in short, would write what is reputed to be the first novel in European fiction.

The Christian coalition that won the Battle of Lepanto had been promoted by Pope Pius V to rescue the Venetian colony of Famagusta on Cyprus, where I spent happy years in the 1950s. This was after Nicosia and other Venetian possessions in Cyprus had fallen to the Ottomans in 1570.

As Wikipedia notes: “The Venetians had surrendered after being reassured that they could leave Cyprus freely. However, the Ottoman commander, Lala Kara Mustafa Pasha, who had lost some 50,000 men in the siege, broke his word, imprisoning the Venetians.”

Then, as I remember being horrified to learn while at school in the 1960s, Marco Antonio Bragadin was flayed alive and his corpse hung on Mustafa’s galley, together with the heads of three other Venetian commanders.

So you could safely say Lepanto was something of a grudge match. And that other statue that the statue of Cervantes appears to be waving at in Nafpaktos is of Giorgos Anemogiannis, who also came to a sticky end at the hands of the Ottomans.

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Introduction

I began this blog with an entry reporting on a visit to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, on 30 September 2003. The blog element of the website has gone through several iterations since, with much of the older material still available.

Like so many things in my life, blog entries blur the boundaries between the personal and the professional. As explained on this site’s Home Page, the website and the blog are part platform for ongoing projects, part autobiography, and part accountability mechanism.

In addition, my blogs have appeared on many sites such as: Chinadialogue, CSRWire, Fast Company, GreenBiz, Guardian Sustainable Business, and the Harvard Business Review.

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John Elkington is a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development. He is currently Founding Partner and Executive Chairman of Volans, a future-focused business working at the intersection of the sustainability, entrepreneurship and innovation movements.

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