The Servos family in nineteenth-century Lefkada: a deputy, a doctor and the records

“Professor of Italian and member of parliament.”

1857 baptismal record, General State Archives in Lefkada; translated by Othisis

In nineteenth-century Lefkada, the name Servos appears in several kinds of public record. Gerasimos became a deputy and later a minister. His brother Zafeirios practised medicine and was connected with the municipal hospital. Between them, their careers show how one family took part in education, medical care and elections on an island that changed states in 1864.

Karya and the documentary trail

Biographical accounts connect the family of Gerasimos Servos, son of Spyridon, with Karya in Lefkada. A local historical article reports vineyards, land and a villa associated with the family in the Karya area.

Later biographies place Gerasimos at the Gymnasium of Lefkada and the Ionian Academy in Corfu, where he is said to have studied law. Zafeirios provided medical care in the town and countryside.

A professor of Italian in 1857

A baptismal record from January 1857, cited in a scholarly study from the General State Archives in Lefkada, describes Gerasimos, son of Spyridon Servos, as a professor of Italian and a member of parliament.

A modern biographical catalogue instead says that Servos taught Spanish. The 1857 record says Italian.

Zafeirios and medical service

Zafeirios Servos, Gerasimos’s brother, appears in local historical research as a doctor and surgeon active in Lefkada from the 1850s. The account draws on older local testimony about his reputation and willingness to treat patients without payment. Such recollections show how he was remembered; they supply no count of patients or procedures.

A more specific episode is reported for 1866. Zafeirios, together with the doctors Konstantinos Alvanitis, Markos Kalkanis and Antonios Servos, wrote to the Municipality of Lefkada offering free service at the municipal hospital. The letter is known through published local research.

The research does not say how Antonios Servos was related to Zafeirios.

The same research later connects Zafeirios with the administration of the hospital and orphanage. It records him taking part in running them; it does not call him their founder.

Social standing and the ballot

A local historian proposes that Zafeirios’s social standing helped Gerasimos at the polls. That is the historian’s reading; no surviving figures show how the doctor’s work affected the vote.

Gerasimos’s electoral strength has independent evidence. In the Lefkadian vote for the twelfth Ionian Parliament on 6 and 7 February 1862, he placed first with 1,393 votes in a poll involving 1,961 electors. The result appeared in the official Ionian Gazette and is reproduced by a historical publication of the Hellenic Parliament.

Another local account describes the Servos and Valaoritis families as political rivals. In the 1862 result both Gerasimos Servos and Aristotelis Valaoritis were elected, and both worked for Union.

The chronology also sets limits. The reported hospital offer came in 1866, two years after Union. It shows four Lefkadian doctors offering free care at the town hospital two years into Greek rule.

The unresolved “Servos House”

Local websites refer to a “Servos House” in Lefkada. No published deed, date or record of residence ties a surviving building to Gerasimos himself.

Gerasimos died in 1900; the local medical history dates Zafeirios’s death to 1889. During their lifetimes, Lefkada passed from the British-protected Ionian state into Greece. One brother carried the family name into parliament and a ministry; the other into the town hospital.

Further Reading

• Andromachi Filippa’s study at the National Hellenic Research Foundation, for archival evidence about education and family relationships.
• Lefkadians, Hellenic Parliament, for the public careers of Lefkada’s representatives.
• Local research on Lefkada’s doctors, for the account of Zafeirios Servos and the municipal hospital.

References

Andromachi Filippa, citing a General State Archives, Lefkada, baptismal record of 27 January 1857; Hellenic Parliament, Lefkadians, pp. 79 and 83–84, citing the official Ionian Gazette for the 1862 election.

Kolivas.de, local historical research on Zafeirios Servos, the 1866 letter, hospital and orphanage; Aroma Lefkadas, on Anastasia Servou and reported family relationships; Kolivas.de, on reported family property near Karya. These local sources are attributed and remain secondary to the original records they describe.

Featured image: Karya, Lefkada, seen from the hillside above the village. Photograph by Alf van Beem, 2014. CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication). Wikimedia Commons.