Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands 1809, Great Britain took possession of all the islands with the exception of Corfu and Paxos, which was only surrendered in 1814. In 1815, the Ionian Islands became a British protectorate under the name United States of the Ionian Islands. The civil and military governor of the Ionian Islands was the "Provveditore generale da Mar", who lived on Corfu and had the supreme peacetime command of the Venetian navy. In wartime, due to his absence at the head of the fleet, he was sometimes replaced by a "Provveditore generale delle Tre Isole" ("Superintendent general of the Three Islands"), referring to
Ionian Islands are found because Io swam across it. Latin transliteration, as well as Modern Greek pronunciation, may suggest that the Ionian Sea and Islands are somehow related to Ionia, an Anatolian region; in fact the Ionian Sea and Ionian Islands are spelled in Greek with an omicron (Ιόνια), whereas Ionia has an omega (Ιωνία), reflecting a classical difference in pronunciation. In Modern Greek omicron and omega represent the same sound, but the two words are still distinguished by stress: the western "Ionia" is accented on the antepenult (), and the eastern on the penult (). In English, the adjective relating to