London – The long-lost city of Ithaca, home of the legendary hero Odysseus in the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” is on the island of Cephalonia off the western shore of Greece, three British researchers announced Thursday.
The original contours of Ithaca have been distorted by a series of earthquakes that raised land levels, converting it into a peninsula of Cephalonia called Paliki, the researchers say.
The researchers said the topographical changes hid the identity of Ithaca from generations of historians and archeologists tracing the epic journey of Odysseus around 1200 B.C.
The team, led by Robert Bittlestone, chairman of the management consultancy Metaprxis Ltd., has identified the geographical locations of 26 specific Ithaca locations mentioned by Homer, they said.
“The ‘Odyssey’ fits Paliki like a glove,” Bittlestone said in London at a news conference for “Odysseus Unbound,” a new book describing the discovery.
His co-authors are historian James Diggle of the University of Cambridge and geologist John Underhill of Edinburgh University.
The next step is to dig for traces of Odysseus’ castle and city as soon as the group can secure sufficient funding.
Some critics have said that Homer didn’t get it right because he lived in Turkey and never visited Ithaca. Others said the story was simply fictional.
“It’s possible that … the whole tale is fictitious,” Diggle said.
But that is what they said about Troy, he added, “until the city was discovered on the northwestern coast of Turkey. The same thing happened with Knossos,” the seat of the Minoan civilization. “What if Homer was right?” asked Bittlestone, who studied the classics at the University of Cambridge in Britain.
“What if the mismatch between geography and the poem hasn’t happened because Homer didn’t understand geography, but because the geography had changed?”
A site identified as Eumaios’ pig farm, where Odysseus poses as a beggar, matches the text, researchers say.
