A 28.5 million sq m island, a $28.5 million painting, £28.5 million overrun in York, and 28.5 million blog hits

Halki off the coast of Rhodes, where I co-chaired one of the workshops at the Halki International Seminar organised by Eliamep in 2002 … some estimates put the size of the island at 28.5 sq km (28.5 million sq metres)

Patrick Comerford

The viewing and reading figures for this blog continue to surprise me, and these figures passed the 28.5 million mark by late yesterday afternoon (23 March 2026).

This is the sixth time this month alone that the half-million figure in readership numbers has been passed, already reaching 28 million on 20 March 2026; 27.5 million the previous Monday (16 March 2026), 27 million on 12 March 2026, 26.5 million on 3 March 2026, and 26 million at the beginning of the month (Sunday 1 March 2026), when the hits that day were also the highest daily figure I have ever recorded (318,307).

This year so far has seen a phenomenal amount of traffic on this blog, reaching a volume of readers that I never have expected when I first started blogging 16 years ago. Half the total hits have been within the past eight or nine months, and the total of hits last month (February 2026) was the highest monthly total ever (3,386,504), with this blog passing the half-million mark seven times in all in February.

At the end of last year, this blog had 21 million hits (31 December 2025). So far this year, there have been more than 7.5 million hits or visitors in 2026.

I first began blogging in 2010, and it took almost two years until July 2012 to reach half a million readers – a number reached five times this month alone. Half of the 28.5 million hits (14.25 million) have been within the last nine or ten months, since mid-July.

Throughout last year and this year, the daily figures have been overwhelming on many occasions. Of the 12 days of busiest traffic on this blog five were this month (March), four were in February, one was in January, and two were in January 2025:

• 318,307 (1 March 2026)
• 314,018 (28 February 2026)
• 301,449 (2 March 2026)
• 289,076 (11 January 2025)
• 285,366 (12 January 2025)
• 280,802 (26 February 2026)

• 273,022 (27 February 2026)
• 261,422 (13 January 2026)
• 228,931 (18 March 2026)
• 204,275 (22 March 2026)
• 195,391 (20 February 2026)
• 195,061 (23 March 2026)

The number of readers has been overpowering this year and last, with the daily averages currently running at about 120,000 hits a day so far this month. Ten years ago, the daily average was around 1,000.

Leonora Carrington’s ‘Les Distractions de Dagobert’ (1945) … sold at auction for $28.5 million two years ago (Image courtesy Sotheby’s)

To put this figure of 28.5 million in context:

A major York regeneration project is already £28.5 million over budget and more than a year behind schedule. But he full scale of the overspend remains unknown, councillors have been told this month. An audit has found ‘critical’ weaknesses in the way the regeneration of the area at the front of York Station has been managed.

Work began in 2023 on the scheme which initially had a budget of £26 million but costs so far stand at £54.7 million, according to the latest estimates. The ongoing Station Gateway scheme has been dogged by oversight problems from its early stages and work has been ongoing since 2024 to ensure issues with the extremely difficult scheme are not repeated in future projects. The project is now due to be finished this summer after originally being slated for completion by May last year.

A painting by the British-born surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) sold for $28.5 million two years ago (May 2024), making her the most valuable UK-born woman artist on the public market.

The painting, ‘Les Distractions de Dagobert’ (1945), was bought by Eduardo F Costantini, an Argentinian business figure, real estate developer and founder of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. He bought the painting at Sotheby’s in New York with a phone bid.

The opening Saturday of the Milano Cortina Games last month was the most-watched day of Olympics coverage since 2014, averaging 28.5 million television views.

Cameroon, Ukraine and Venezuela have populations of about 28.5 million, Kenya has a total of 28.5 million registered voters.

28,500 sq km is 28.5 million sq metres. Depending on how you measure the land area of an island, 28,500 sq km is given in different sources as the size of the islands of Halki off the coast of Rhodes, where I co-chaired one of the workshops at the Halki International Seminar organised by the Athens-based think-tank Eliamep in 2002; and the size of Gavdos, off the coast of Crete, the southernmost Greek island.

Kherson, Kyiv and Potlava oblasts, three of the 24 oblasts into which Ukraine is divided administratively, are each about 28.5 sq km in land area. 28.5 sq km is the area of Little Cayman in the Cayman Islands and the surface area of Lake Malawi, which is shared by Malawi, Tanzania, and Mozambique.

28.5 million minutes is about 54 years, 2 months, and 7 days. In other words, if this blog was getting only one hit a minute, it would take more than 54 years, from the beginning of 1972, to reach this latest figure of 28 million.

It is four years since I retired from active parish ministry in March 2022. These days, though, about 100 people on average are reading my daily prayer diary posted on this blog each morning. I imagine many of my priest-colleagues would be prayerfully thankful if the congregations in their churches totalled 700 or more people each week.

Today, I am very grateful to the real readers among those 28.5 million hits on this blog to date, and in particular I remain grateful to the faithful core group of about 100 people who join me in prayer, reading and reflections each day.

The Station Gateway regeneration project in York is £28.5 million over budget (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Would the Rhodes Scholars of 20 years ago challenge the Rhodes Statue in Oxford?

The statue of Cecil Rhodes on the High Street façade of the Rhodes Building in Oriel College, Oxford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Patrick Comerford

Twenty years ago, immediately after leaving the staff of The Irish Times, I was invited to co-chair one of the workshops at the Halki International Seminar organised by the Athens-based think-tank Eliamep on the island of Halki off the coast of Rhodes.

The Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy is an independent, non-governmental, non-profit think-tank, established in 1988.

The participants in the Halki programme in September 2002 included academics, journalists, politicians and policy makers, and we were hosted in a charming small hotel on the small island 10 km off the west coast of Rhodes.

During a free afternoon in the programme, I volunteered to take a small, select but mixed international group to Rhodes for a walking tour of the old town, to visit the surviving mosques and synagogue, to meet some business owners and shopkeepers of Turkish descent.

It was an exercise in ‘political ecumenism’ and a celebration of cultural diversity. At the time I felt I knew Rhodes well, having spent time there both working as a journalist and on family holidays.

For the rest of the seminar on Halki, the participants in that afternoon ‘field trip’ joked about ourselves as the ‘Rhodes Scholars’ among Eliamep’s students and panellists.

Walking around Oxford this month, I wondered, 20 years to the date, whether any of us would be happy referring to ourselves today as ‘Rhodes Scholars.’

For some years now, the statue of Cecil Rhodes statue overlooking the High Street in Oxford has been the subject of a number of protests, with calls for its removal. It has become a focus for public debate on racism and the legacy of colonialism.

Oriel College has placed a small notice below his statue on the Rhodes Building, explaining that his statue is controversial and that the college is addressing this.

The Rhodes Building in Oriel College, Oxford, was funded by a legacy from Cecil Rhodes (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902) was a student at Oriel College intermittently between 1873 and 1881. When he died, he left most of his estate to establish the Rhodes Trust to fund scholarships for the Rhodes Scholars – students from Germany, the US, and the then British colonies.

He left £100,000 to Oriel College, of which £40,000 was designated for building a new building to replace houses along the High Street side of the college. The New Building, as it was initially known, was built in 1909-1911. Its design incorporated a set of statues commissioned from Henry Alfred Pegram, which included one of Cecil Rhodes.

However, Rhodes’s activities made him controversial as a benefactor. He arrived in southern Africa in 1871 at the age of 17 and was based there for the rest of his life. He quickly made himself a fortune through diamond mining; and he went on to establish himself politically, entering the Cape Parliament in 1881 and becoming Prime Minster of the Cape Colony in 1890.

The conduct of these activities and their impact on black Africans have attracted much criticism, both at the time and since.

The Rhodes Building forms the north range of Saint Mary’s (or ‘the Third’) Quadrangle at Oriel College. It was built to house undergraduates and Fellows of the college. It was built in 1909-1911 to the designs of Basil Champneys (1842-1935) in a bold Jacobethan style.

The Rhodes Building fills the whole stretch of the High between Magpie Lane and Oriel Street, and seven houses had to be demolished to make room for it.

The new building was not universally regarded as an enhancement to the street. In his memoirs in 1927, WE Sherwood wrote that Oriel had ‘broken out into the High, … destroying a most picturesque group of old houses in so doing, and, to put it gently, hardly compensating us for their removal.’

James Morris wrote in Oxford (1965): ‘If you are very old indeed, you are probably still fuming about the façade built in the High Street by Oriel College in 1909, which most of us scarcely notice nowadays, but used to be thought an absolute outrage.’

In all, there are seven life-size statues including Rhodes on the building, all sculpted in Portland stone by Henry Alfred Pegram. King Edward VII and King George V were chosen because one had died and the other had come to the throne in the year the building was being erected. The other four are former heads of the college: Cardinal William Allen (1532-1594), Walter Hart or Lyhert (Provost, 1435-1446), John Hales (Provost, 1446-1449) and Henry Sampson (Provost, 1449-1476).

The Rhodes Building remains largely unaltered, except for modifications to the south-east wing in 1981, and today it provides both student and office accommodation.

The campaign to remove the statue of Rhodes was taken up again by ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ in June 2020, in conjunction with Black Lives Matter (BLM), following the death of George Floyd in the US.

The Governing Body of Oriel College voted on 17 June 2020 to launch an independent Commission of Inquiry into the key issues surrounding both the Rhodes statue and a plaque on King Edward Street and to appoint the Master of St Cross College, Carole Souter, as the Chair for the Commission. In May 2021 that commission recommended the removal of the statue.

Meanwhile, a notice below Pegram’s statue of Rhodes declares:

‘This building was constructed by Oriel College in 1910-11 with money left in the will of Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902), a former student of the college. The college commissioned a series of statues to front the building which includes Rhodes at the top.

‘Rhodes, a committed British colonialist, obtained his fortune through the exploitation of minerals, lands, and peoples of southern Africa. Some of his activities led to great loss of life and attracted criticism in his day and ever since.

‘In recent years, the statue has become a focus for public debate on racism and the legacy of colonialism. In June 2020, Oriel College declared its wish to remove the statue but is not doing so following legal and regulatory advice.’

Oriel College explains its position on the statue of Cecil Rhodes (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

‘The freedom we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life’

Pericles’ Funeral Oration by Philipp von Foltz (1860)

Patrick Comerford

The Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (Αλέξης Τσίπρας) had his new cabinet were sworn in on Wednesday [23 September 2015] following Sunday’s election, many of the senior positions going to members of the previous cabinet – a move that is seen by many observers as attempt to present stability and indicate a commitment to the terms of Greece’s bailout terms.

The thorny issues the new 27-member cabinet is expected to tackle in the weeks to come include pension cuts, tax increases on farmers, recapitalisation of banks, the privatisation of state assets and the liberalisation of closed markets.

Doubtless, these measures are going to bring further hardship to the long-suffering people of Greece. They are going to be put in place before international inspectors begin a review of the economy as a step towards to unlocking €3 billion in aid and address the crucial issue of debt relief for Greece.

Earlier this month, the Athens daily newspaper Kathimerini published a glossy magazine supplement, Greece Is Democracy, devoted entirely to the theme of Greek democracy.

The contributors include leading Greek and international academics from Professor Mary Beard of Cambridge to the Greek historian Thanos Veremis, who founded the thin-tank Eliamep (Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy) – I co-chaired one of the workshops at the Halki International Seminar organised by Eliamep on the island of Halki off Rhodes in 2002.

The publication of this colourful supplement marked the occasion of the Athens Democracy Forum 2015, but also came a week before the latest elections.

The cover illustrates the famous funeral oration by Pericles in 430 BC, as recorded by Thucydides (Peloponnesian War, Book 2.34-46). It is a timeless statement on the value of democracy:

“Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighbouring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if no social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.

“The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.

“Further, we provide plenty of means for the mind to refresh itself from business. We celebrate games and sacrifices all the year round, and the elegance of our private establishments forms a daily source of pleasure and helps to banish the spleen; while the magnitude of our city draws the produce of the world into our harbour, so that to the Athenian the fruits of other countries are as familiar a luxury as those of his own.

“If we turn to our military policy, there also we differ from our antagonists. We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger. In proof of this it may be noticed that the Lacedaemonians do not invade our country alone, but bring with them all their confederates; while we Athenians advance unsupported into the territory of a neighbour, and fighting upon a foreign soil usually vanquish with ease men who are defending their homes.

“Our united force was never yet encountered by any enemy, because we have at once to attend to our marine and to dispatch our citizens by land upon a hundred different services; so that, wherever they engage with some such fraction of our strength, a success against a detachment is magnified into a victory over the nation, and a defeat into a reverse suffered at the hands of our entire people. And yet if with habits not of labour but of ease, and courage not of art but of nature, we are still willing to encounter danger, we have the double advantage of escaping the experience of hardships in anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as fearlessly as those who are never free from them.

“Nor are these the only points in which our city is worthy of admiration.

“We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it. Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and, instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.

“Again, in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation, each carried to its highest point, and both united in the same persons; although usually decision is the fruit of ignorance, hesitation of reflection. But the palm of courage will surely be adjudged most justly to those, who best know the difference between hardship and pleasure and yet are never tempted to shrink from danger. In generosity we are equally singular, acquiring our friends by conferring, not by receiving, favours. Yet, of course, the doer of the favour is the firmer friend of the two, in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in his debt; while the debtor feels less keenly from the very consciousness that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift. And it is only the Athenians, who, fearless of consequences, confer their benefits not from calculations of expediency, but in the confidence of liberality.”

The swearing-in ceremony of the new Greek Cabinet earlier this week (Photograph: Michalis Karagiannis/Reuters/Guardian)

In what may be the most academic cabinet in any EU member state, with probably the highest number of PhDs, Dr Euclid Tsakalotos (Ευκλείδης Στεφάνου Τσακαλώτος), returns as Finance Minister. He is a Rotterdam-born economist and went to Saint Paul’s School, London, before going on to Queen’s College, Oxford. He held that position in July and August, and helped to negotiate Greece’s third bailout with its international creditors after Yanis Varoufakis stepped down.

Euclid Tsakalotos is a leading member of the “group of 53,” a faction within Syriza that has an uneasy relationship with Alexis Tsipras, and some members of the faction even threatened not run in last Sunday’s election.

Yannis Dragasakis (Γιάννης Δραγασάκης) returns as Deputy Prime Minister, and is overseeing the bailout-related ministries. He is from Lasithi in Crete and has studied in London. He was a prominent member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece until 1991. He resigned to join Synaspismos, which became one of the founding forces in Syriza.

Dr George Chouliarakis (Γιώργος Χουλιαράκης) is the alternate finance minister and remains the chief economist and negotiator. He has a doctorate from Warwick University and is a lecturer in economics at the University of Manchester. He was also the chief negotiator for the Greek government in the run-up to the third bailout package, and is known in the Greek press as the “invisible negotiator.”

Panos Skourletis (Πάνος Σκουρλέτης), who remains Energy Minister, studied economics at the University of Piraeus.

Dr George Stathakis (Γιώργος Σταθάκης) is back as Minister of the Economy. He was elected for the Chania constituency in Crete. He is a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Crete and a former Vice-Rector, but has been on leave since he was first elected in 2012.

Dr Nikos Kotzias (Νικόλαος Κοτζιάς), who remains Foreign Minister, has worked at Oxford and Harvard, and is Professor of Political Theories and International and European Studies at the University of Piraeus.

The leader of the right-wing Independent Greeks (ANEL), Panos Kammenos (Πάνος Καμμένος), is the Defence Minister. He has claimed that “Europe is governed by German neo-Nazis” and has called German’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble persona non grata because of the war reparations that Kammenos demands from Germany.

A colourful member of the government in Terence Spencer Nicholas Quick (Τέρενς Σπένσερ Νικόλαος Κουΐκ) a well-known journalist and member of the Independent Greeks, who returns as Deputy Minister of State for Coordinating Government Operations. He worked for a number of newspapers and front many well-known newspapers, and is a former member of the leading opposition conservative party, New Democracy.

But within hours of the cabinet being sworn in, the deputy minister of infrastructure and transport, Dimitris Kammenos of ANEL was forced to step down because of his antisemitic views. He recently posted a picture on his Facebook page doctoring the words above the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp to “We’re staying in Europe.”

He and his right-wing party leader more than any other cabinet members needed to hear those words of Pericles: “We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing.”

But perhaps everyone sitting at the cabinet table over the next few weeks will be conscious too of these words from Pericles: “We have the double advantage of escaping the experience of hardships in anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as fearlessly as those who are never free from them.”