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The Science and Research Centre Koper (ZRS Koper) and the European Cultural Centre of Delphi (ECCD) have established the Kapodistrias Residential Fellowship, a new research residency in Koper named after the Greek statesman Ioannis Kapodistrias. The first fellowship has been awarded to the Greek historian Dr Emmanouil Peponas, who will spend February 2027 at the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies in Palazzo Tiepolo-Gravisi, working on a project devoted to Kapodistrias himself.
The fellowship is a one-month residency for early-career and established researchers in the humanities, particularly philosophy, comparative literature, history and religious studies. It commemorates Kapodistrias’s legacy by fostering scholarly exchange across the Upper Adriatic and the wider Mediterranean. ZRS Koper hosts each fellow and provides accommodation and research facilities, while the ECCD contributes towards travel. Each fellow also organises a scholarly event in cooperation with both institutions. Fellows are chosen by a selection committee appointed by ZRS Koper and the ECCD. The fellowship also has a local resonance: the Kapodistrias family took its name from Capodistria, today’s Koper, from where it settled in Corfu in the Middle Ages.
The first award falls in 2026, the year that marks 250 years since the birth of Ioannis Kapodistrias (Corfu, 1776 – Nafplio, 1831), commemorated in Greece and abroad. Kapodistrias held ministerial office in the Septinsular Republic of the Ionian Islands, served the Russian Empire as State Secretary for Foreign Affairs under Tsar Alexander I, alongside Karl Nesselrode, helped shape Switzerland’s federal order and secure international recognition of its permanent neutrality in 1815, and became the first Governor of Greece (1828–1831).
Dr Peponas’s project, “Kapodistrias’s Mediterranean: Venetian and Post-Venetian Administrative Networks between the Ionian Islands, Epirus, and Istria”, compares the institutions that the Republic of Venice built across its former Adriatic and Ionian domain – local government, notarial and judicial practice, Church–state relations – and how they were adapted or dismantled after its fall in 1797. Kapodistrias, whose political formation began in Venetian Corfu, serves as the connecting figure. In Koper, the work will focus on the Istrian and Capodistrian side of the comparison.
Dr Peponas is a historian of modern and contemporary Greece. He received his PhD from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 2024 and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of the Peloponnese.
Further information: Dr Alberto Parisi, Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies, ZRS Koper.
Foto: Aaron Burden (Unsplash)