Ionian University 1864, up to the Union of the Ionian Islands with the Greek State. Τhe Ionian University was established in 1984 by the Greek government under the Prime Ministership of Andreas Papandreou in recognition of Corfu's contribution to education in Greece as the seat of the first University of Greece, the Ionian Academy, that was established in 1824, forty years before the cession of the Ionian islands to Greece and just three years after Greece's Revolution of 1821. The Prime Ministership thus kept an election promise to the people of Corfu, satisfying their long held demand that a successor university to
Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands the Ionian Islands. Because of its status, Italian was also taught at schools along with Greek and English (Ionian Islands were a protectorate of the United Kingdom from 1815 until 1864). In the First Year of the secondary education, for instance, Greek was taught four times a week, Italian three times and English twice. In the Greek Census of 1907, 4,675 people from the Ionian Islands stated Catholicism as their denomination, about 1.8% of the total population (254,494), while 2,541 (1%) Ionians stated Italian as their mother tongue, making it the second language by number of speakers. The Italian language