The Kavanagh family

One particular visitor to Butrint in the mid 19th century is of particular interest from the point of view of his extraordinary character. Sir Arthur Mcmurrough Kavanagh, an Irish aristocrat and descendent of the Kings of Leinster, was born disabled with only vestigial arms and legs, yet he became a noted horseman, yachtsman, a crack shot with a rifle, and – most importantly for the story of Butrint – an early amateur photographer.

Kavanagh’s mother, Lady Harriet, was a great traveller, making journeys to Constantinople, the Black Sea coast, the Holy Land and Egypt – as well as to Corfu and Albania. At Ioannina she had an audience with Veli Pasha, grandson of Ali Pasha. Throughout she kept a travel journal and a sketchbook, representing one of the earliest accounts by a woman of travel in nineteenth-century Epirus.

Encouraged by his redoubtable mother Kavanagh, too, undertook a series of long journeys. He accompanied her on a long visit to Egypt and the Holy Land, visiting Henry Layard’s excavations at Nimrud en route, and in the 1840s he went overland with his brothers to India, via Scandinavia, Russia, Turkey and Persia.

Kavanagh’s love of hunting, sailing and photography took him to the Mediterranean on a number of occasions. Butrint and the Ksamili peninsular was a favourite location and Kavanagh stopped there in both 1860 and 1862. Rather than the ruins and the classical connotations of Butrint, the attraction was undoubtedly the rich wildlife and the opportunities the area offered for good hunting.

Certainly, in 1862 he organised a hunting party at Ksamili, employing local beaters to flush game birds and boar out of the thick undergrowth, making for his efforts an impressive bag of the local wildlife. This hunting party was immortalised in one of Kavanagh’s own photographs and a full account of his journey and the pictures themselves were published in his book The Cruise of the Eva.