Gerasimos Servos across the Ionian and Greek parliaments

“The sworn Gerasimos Servos.”

Proceedings of the Hellenic Parliament, 1865–1866, vol. I, p. 183; translated by Othisis

Gerasimos Servos appears in two parliamentary records separated by the Union of the Ionian Islands with Greece. In February 1862 he placed first in Lefkada’s election to the Ionian Parliament. In 1865, the proceedings of the Hellenic Parliament recorded his oath. Between those entries, the state in which he practised politics ceased to exist.

A Lefkadian public life

Servos was born in 1819. Later biographical accounts identify him as the son of Spyridon Servos and connect the family with Karya in Lefkada, a trail followed in The Servos family in nineteenth-century Lefkada. They also place him at the Gymnasium of Lefkada and the Ionian Academy in Corfu, where he is said to have studied law. No archival record of his schooling has yet been published.

A record from January 1857 is firmer. A scholarly study citing the General State Archives in Lefkada reproduces a baptismal entry that describes Gerasimos, son of Spyridon Servos, as a professor of Italian and a member of parliament. A modern catalogue calls him a teacher of Spanish; the 1857 record says Italian.

Teaching, law and representation belonged to the same institutional environment without amounting to a single political programme. Ionian deputies worked through petitions, electoral proceedings and constitutional arguments. Servos’s profession placed him among people trained to work with texts and public institutions.

Defeat before election

His first documented electoral result was a defeat. The Hellenic Parliament’s historical volume Lefkadians, which draws on contemporary election sources, lists Servos as a government candidate in a supplementary election in December 1852. That contest was annulled in 1854. In the new vote of 3 and 4 April, Evangelos Tzarlambas received 485 affirmative votes and Servos 391. Servos lodged an objection.

He was first elected for Lefkada at the vote of 26 and 27 January 1857, to the eleventh Ionian Parliament. This was the legislature of the United States of the Ionian Islands, a state under British protection. It was neither the Hellenic Parliament nor the earlier Septinsular Republic of 1800 to 1807.

During the late 1850s, British officials considered constitutional reforms to the Protectorate. William Gladstone’s mission belonged to that effort. A Lefkadian historical reconstruction reports that Servos, Aristotelis Valaoritis and Ioannis Marinos opposed reforms they considered inadequate to the demand for Union. The same source names Valaoritis and Marinos, but not Servos, on the committee that prepared an 1859 petition to Queen Victoria.

Servos placed first in February 1862

The clearest measure of Servos’s local electoral standing comes from the vote of 6 and 7 February 1862. The parliamentary history cites the official Ionian Gazette, issue 564 of 3/15 February, page 9. Of 1,961 participating electors, Servos received 1,393 votes. Georgios Kalkanis followed with 1,321, Evangelos Tzarlambas with 1,320, Efstathios Filippas with 1,168, Valaoritis with 1,094 and Dimitrios Kontaris with 1,048. Marinos received 821 and failed to win a seat.

This was a multi-seat election, held under Ionian rules two years before Union. First place shows Servos’s support in that vote; Valaoritis came fifth and Marinos, who had worked on the earlier unionist initiatives, lost.

Union as a legal break

The thirteenth Ionian Parliament voted for Union on 23 September 1863. That decision preceded the international and administrative transfer. The Treaty of London was signed on 29 March 1864, and Union took effect on 21 May, when British protection ended and the islands became part of Greece.

For a deputy, the change involved new electoral procedures, another parliament and a different legal order. In the first volume of the Hellenic Parliament’s proceedings for 1865 to 1866, printed page 183 is headed “Oath Protocol”. Servos’s name appears among the signatories.

The official volume also confirms his election in Lefkada in 1868 and lists him among the successful candidates in 1885; in 1887 he appears among those defeated. So he was not elected continuously, as some modern lists suggest.

A minister in 1875

Servos later served as Minister of Naval Affairs in Charilaos Trikoupis’s first government. Biographical catalogues give 3 June 1875 as the date of his appointment; the Hellenic Parliament’s publication on Trikoupis confirms the office.

Servos died in 1900.

Further Reading

• Lefkadians, Hellenic Parliament, on Lefkada’s parliamentary representatives and Ionian elections.
• Proceedings of the Hellenic Parliament, 1865 to 1866, including the oath protocol.
• Andromachi Filippa’s study at the National Hellenic Research Foundation, for archival evidence about education and family relationships.

References

Hellenic Parliament, Lefkadians, pp. 76–84, especially pp. 77–79; underlying election sources: Official Gazette of the United States of the Ionian Islands, no. 278, 26 January/7 February 1857, p. 5, and Official Gazette of the United States of the Ionian Islands, no. 564, 3/15 February 1862, p. 9.

Hellenic Parliament, Proceedings, 1865 to 1866, vol. I, printed p. 183; Hellenic Parliament publication on Charilaos Trikoupis, pp. 27–29.

Andromachi Filippa, citing the General State Archives in Lefkada, baptismal entry of 27 January 1857; Aroma Lefkadas, attributed local reconstruction of the 1859 petition and 1861 memorandum.