Is the culture on Corfu any different than in the rest of Greece considering it was never occupied by the Ottomans?

I’ve wanted to know the answer to this question bad enough, that I want to spend time in Corfu or Zante next time I’m in Greece.

Though as a friend has justly pointed out to me, there’s no way I’d grok the cultural differences between the Ionian Islands and the rest of Greece as a tourist within a couple of days at a resort hotel.

The music is Italianate: mandolins and barbershop quarters. There’s less Turkish in the dialect. But from the stories written by Konstantinos Theotokis | Greek author in the early 1900s, the peasantry was as patriarchal and closeminded in Corfu as they were in Thessaly or Crete. My suspicion is, not massively different. The peasantry were the peasantry, and whether the local overlord was a nobleman in the Libro d’Oro or the local ağa didn’t impact their daily life.

I hope someone else can tell more!