Ithaca, and the descendants of Odysseus

Well, we have seen the statue and found the street name in Vathi, so that must be definitive proof that Odysseus came from Ithaca.

Proof that Odysseus lived in Vathi, Ithaca?

Alix with Odysseus in Vathi

The locals would certainly have you believe that, because it’s terribly good for business. But I’m not convinced, as I explained last season in “The Voyage of Odysseus”. Not only does the theory not make sense from a sailor’s geographical perspective, but should Homer’s epic poem really be studied so literally? After all, Homer lived about 500 years after the Trojan war, and much of the story he recalled may have been passed down to him orally through poetry or storytelling. So how accurate could it be? As academics have cumulatively spent millions of hours studying the problem, I don’t really have a lot to add [Alix: that’ll be a first].

But if Odysseus did live on Ithaca, then being based near Vathi would have been a good call. The invisible bay would have been a wonderful natural, deep harbour for his ships. There is plenty of protection from the winter gales. There’s plenty of flat and level land around the harbour for the shipbuilding trades and arsenal (assuming he had one). And there would have been plenty of trees such as fir and pine for ship construction. [In fact, the French fortified and used the bay during their brief Napoleonic occupation]. I can’t spot any cedar for ship-building around, but perhaps it was all chopped down, or never grew on the island. The only issue is that Vathi bay has no oversight over the ‘Inland Sea’ outside the bay, so Odysseus would have needed a manned station outside the bay to warn of arriving friends and foe.

The French loved Vathi harbour, and Odysseus would no doubt have agreed

There are plenty of other smaller bays that have direct views out onto the sea, such as Frikes and Kioni. And, indeed, these have been pirate bases in later years from which floating brigands would have rowed or sailed out at high speed to rob the poor sailors as they passed into view. But if the autumn or winter winds are in the east, large waves can come piling into these small harbours – as they still do- smashing much of what’s there. Frikes’ village quay has just been re-built after the last storm.

There is a bay on the western shore - in the Ithaca channel between Cephalonia and Ithaca – where British and Greek archaeologists have found Mycenaean artefacts in a sea cave that is now submerged due to severe earthquakes. It is called Polis Bay, but the idea that it would have been Odysseus’ home ignores the fact that it offers no protection from the main elements – the wind and sea.

Mycenaean artefacts have been in a cave at Polis Bay, but it is no sheltered harbour

Ithaca is a big lump of steep, mountainous limestone, the sedimentary beds uplifted obliquely from an ancient sea floor. It is probably saturated in freshly-filtered rain water, and so incredibly green that you often have to pinch yourself that you are in Greece. There is plenty of timber, but the pines and firs that we walked past are small, scrubby affairs clinging onto a thin layer of topsoil. I’m not sure that you could build much more than a small rowing boat.

Other small shrubby trees that we spotted included the Pistacia lentiscus. I have been reading that this tree was the main crop of the island of Chios (in the Eastern Aegean off the Turkish coast). In Ottoman times, the Sultan was a big ‘buyer’ of the gum or aromatic resin that oozes from its cut stem. Apparently, his harem was encouraged to chew it because it sweetened their breath! Mr Wrigley must have been a scholar of the Turkish era?

That this mythical island has been populated for 3,500 years is clear. It’s just that the evidence has been shaken to the ground numerous times by huge earth tremors. When ‘Missy Bear’ was parked up in Sami (back on Cephalonia across the straits), we hiked up a steep wooded hill to the ancient acropolis/castle of Sami. It would have been quite an extensive settlement in its day, with levelled terraces and huge, gnarled olive trees growing in and around the rubble of ruined walls or buildings. There is not much left standing to admire, but one of the old fortified entrances into the centre is still partly intact. It reminded me of a tiny version of the Lion Gate at Mycenae.

The views of the bay far below and of the straits looking north are spectacular. Odysseus was a Mycenaean-era Greek (around 1,300 BC), and his Ionian islands would have been later occupied, I assume, by the wave of Dorian immigrants in about 1,000 BC. (Remember, the Ionians didn’t migrate this far south and then spread east from Athens across the Aegean to create ‘Ionia’.)

Mycenaean-era entrance walls at Sami across the water on Cephalonia

Commanding view of Ithaca from Sami

I wondered why even the Romans bothered to keep the acropolis at Sami as a main settlement rather than down in the harbour. It’s a long walk uphill. Maybe it was safety from pirates, and many old settlements remained on the high ground for reasons of security. Or maybe it was to convey power to the locals? I hadn’t appreciated just how brutal the later Roman invasion and occupation of Greece had been. Perhaps if Mark Antony and Cleopatra had beaten Octavian at the Battle of Aktion (where Missy Bear overwintered), Greece would have become part of the Egyptian Empire. As it was, Augustus and later Roman emperors taxed their Greek territories to fund the building of Rome not from brick but from marble! I expect that the Ithacans were not exempt from these taxes.

The double-headed eagle of Byzantium, looking east and west

Although the western Roman empire collapsed - and the Visigoths perhaps passed through the Ionian Islands - the early Arabs never got this far. This is because the Eastern Roman empire (that everyone else called Rome, until the Victorian English termed it Byzantium) provided a buffer and security from the rapid Muslim expansion into Africa and Europe. Constantinople was ‘impregnable’. As James Heneage states in "The Shortest History of Greece":

"If you lined up the world’s great empires in order of longevity, Britain’s would be near the back. Somewhere between three and six centuries is the average, with a few more recent examples, like Germany’s Third Reich, not even managing a decade. Only one survived more than a millennium, for most of which it was the leading military and economic force of its continent. This was the Greek Empire. It spanned the 1,130 years from the foundation of Constantinople in 330 CE to the final surrender of the Peloponnese to the Ottomans in 1460. It was the Victorians who named the empire Byzantium, recognising that although the people had called themselves Rhomaioi, they were very different to their contemporaries in Rome. Culturally, linguistically, and for the most part ethnically, they were Greek."

We think we saw evidence of the Normans in Fiscardo, Cephalonia. There is no reason to believe that they didn’t have a look at what Ithaca had to offer. But the Ottomans only ever held Ithaca briefly, as far as I know, in the late 15th century. It was the Venetians – the navy of Byzantine empire and enemy of the Normans – that kept the Ottomans from the islands. Whereas their neighbours across the Inland Sea on the mainland were being farmed for tax by the Sultan’s administrators – often Greeks themselves - the islanders were part of the string-like Venetian maritime trading empire that stretched from Venice to the Black Sea and the Levant. This “tax-farming” on the mainland was ruthless and as Heneage relates:

“…many desperate men retreated into the mountains to become klephts (‘bandits’ or ‘thieves’, as in kleptomania [Ed, or Lamb Kleftiko, named after the dish cooked by the bandits] while others took to the sea to prey on the busy shipping lanes of the Peloponnese. Or they emigrated. In 1675 alone, 430 members of the Stefanopoulos clan left the Mani – the central finger of the Greek Peloponnese – for Corsica. Some believe they are the ancestors of Napoleon Bonaparte."

But the islands’ population may have been spared this fate. And also spared the later Ottoman ethnic cleansing in Epirus by Ali Pasha. Ithaca and the other islands certainly feel to me wholly Greco-Venetian. Despite the many earthquakes having razed the housing and churches to the ground, they have been rebuilt - as far as possible using the stipulated re-enforced concrete - in a way that reflects that heritage.

The architecture may look Venetian, but it's only skin-deep; the bones are rebar and concrete to withstand tremors

The churches are all purely Orthodox in architectural layout and internal decoration. Yes, that means lots and lots of icons, and even more gold. In fact, I suspect that Ithaca and the other islands probably benefited from the emigration from mainland Epirus and the Peloponnese. The islands became a hot-bed of resistance to the Ottoman Empire and a source of propaganda for Greek Independence, of which we’ll no doubt return to in later blogs.

Orthodox Church in Kioni, probably rebuilt

When the London Protocol formalised the new nation of Greece in 1830, the population numbered only 800,000, most of whom were subsistence farmers. The new nation was only the Peloponnese mainland plus a strip along the coast near Athens and could not support itself financially. This was still the case when Britain gave Ithaca and the other Island to Greece in 1864. Nevertheless, it was only the second country to gain independence from an Empire. The first was… America, which seceded from Britain.

Independence and further expansion (the ‘Big Idea’) has been a struggle, of which more in later blogs no doubt. Civil infighting and national bankruptcy in the late 19th century led to further emigrations, which have continued to this day for largely economic reasons.

I suspect that Ithaca - Odysseus’s home or not – is far less populated than it once was. When you walk around the island, you constantly stumble across old olive trees, standing stoically amid lines of rubble that were old walls. But after all the man-made misery, one of the biggest mass exoduses followed the devastation caused by the earthquake of 1953, when 70% of buildings were wrecked!

So, the Gods had the final word, and here walk the ghosts of Odysseus’ descendants…