Where Was Ithaca? Odysseus' Home Was Not an Island, Study Says

On 4 July 2026, just under two weeks before the cinema release of Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," two scholars published in the Antigone Journal a result that takes apart their own favorite hypothesis and rescues it at the same time. The classicist James Diggle of the University of Cambridge and the geologist John Underhill of the University of Aberdeen spent twenty years investigating where Odysseus' homeland Ithaca lay. Their answer: not on the island that is called Ithaki today, and probably not on any island.

In short: according to Diggle and Underhill, Homer's Ithaca lay on Paliki, the western peninsula of the island of Kefalonia. Geology shows that Paliki was not an island in the Bronze Age, and so the authors propose a new thought: Homer nowhere calls Ithaca an island. That is a proposal from the proponents of this theory, and the common identification with today's island of Ithaki is not settled by it.

In Book 9, Odysseus describes his homeland to the Phaeacian king Alcinous. He says Ithaca has a mountain, "Neriton," that many islands lie around it close together, Doulichion, Same, and wooded Zacynthos, and that Ithaca itself lies low, furthest out to sea toward the west, the others further off toward the east. This gives three clues: Ithaca belongs to a group with these three islands, it lies west of them, and it is low-lying, not mountainous.

Zacynthos is undisputedly the island of that name today, Same was identified with Kefalonia already by ancient scholars. That leaves only one island for Doulichion and Ithaca, if Ithaca is today's Ithaki. In addition, Ithaki doesn't fit the other clues either: it is the easternmost of the islands and mountainous, with cliffs that fall sheer into the sea.

The question is old. Strabo, who wrote around the turn of the era, seems in one passage of his Geography to identify Ithaki with Homer's Ithaca, in another more with Lefkada. William Gell placed it in 1807 on the Aetos isthmus of Ithaki. The German archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who excavated extensively on Ithaki and Lefkada, argued in 1927 that the palace of Odysseus lay on Lefkada, west of Nidri on the south coast. And the local historian Gerasimos Volterras brought Paliki into play as early as 1903.

The hypothesis that caused the greatest stir in 2005 comes from the businessman and researcher Robert Bittlestone. In his book "Odysseus Unbound" (Cambridge University Press, 2005, written with the help of James Diggle and John Underhill) he argued that Ithaca is the western peninsula of Kefalonia, today called Paliki, after its ancient capital Paleis. The island of Ithaki would then be Homer's Doulichion, and in fact Ithaki bore that name on older maps.

Paliki is low land: the highest point is at 517 meters, while on Kefalonia Mount Ainos reaches 1,640 meters. It is the westernmost part of the island group and thus fits the clues. There was only one problem: Paliki is not an island but a peninsula, connected to the rest of Kefalonia by a land bridge about six kilometers long and two kilometers wide in the Thinia Valley.

Bittlestone found a way out in Strabo. Strabo wrote of Kefalonia that where the island is narrowest it forms a low isthmus that is often "submerged from sea to sea." Bittlestone concluded that in the Late Bronze Age around 1200 BC, at the time of the Trojan War, a navigable marine channel had lain in this valley that later rockfalls after earthquakes filled in. Paliki would then have been a true island at that time.

This hypothesis could be tested, and Diggle and Underhill did so for twenty years. John Underhill mapped the Thinia Valley anew, his first borehole went 121.25 meters deep and found marine fossils, which at first gave encouragement. With support from the geodata company Fugro, LiDAR, seismic surveys, airborne electromagnetics, and gravity and resistivity profiles followed. In total, thirteen boreholes were drilled, and the cores are now stored in Aberdeen.

The result is clear: the Thinia Valley last lay under seawater 400,000 to 290,000 years ago. A marine channel in Roman times or in the Late Bronze Age is thereby refuted. Strabo's sentence also looks different now: the Greek word usually translated "submerged" literally means "is washed over." So Strabo describes water flowing over land, not a marine channel. The Katochori Plain was a shallow basin with a meadow that at times became a freshwater lake and drained into the sea at both ends. The authors themselves write that "Strabo's channel" was Bittlestone's channel, not Strabo's.

With that, the idea that Paliki was Ithaca seemed dead, because Bittlestone had considered both inseparable: Ithaca must be an island, so a channel was needed. James Diggle questioned the assumption. His finding: Homer has many opportunities to call Ithaca an island but never does. He says "land," "homeland," or "region." The ship's arrival in Book 13 lands not "on the island" but "in the land of Ithaca." There is also a fine linguistic difference: islands in Homer are "flowing around" with water, Ithaca by contrast only "surrounded" by sea, and Paliki is surrounded by sea on three sides.

There is also a ferry in the Odyssey that brings cattle and people to Ithaca, and a strait between Ithaca and Same in which the suitors lie in wait for Telemachus. That fits the Gulf of Argostoli, across which a ferry still runs today from Argostoli to Lixouri. Diggle concludes: Ithaca was a peninsula, Same the eastern part of the same island, and the island as a whole Kefalonia. The word does not fit into the Homeric verse, which is why Homer never uses it, but he does call the inhabitants "Cephallenians." The name Ithaca later passed to today's island of Ithaki.

By the 5th century BC the peninsula was no longer called Ithaca: Herodotus and Thucydides call the entire island Cephallenia. But the name Ithaca was deeply embedded in the consciousness of the Greeks, and when they looked for it and failed to recognize the peninsula, because they thought Ithaca an island, they found it on the island Homer calls Doulichion, today's Ithaki. The Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos, who excavated on Paliki himself and held it to be Ithaca, suggested an explanation: an earthquake devastated Paliki, the inhabitants moved to Doulichion and took their name with them.

There were excavations on Paliki itself, including at the Livadi Marsh, which Bittlestone proposed as the harbor of Odysseus. According to reports, they show that the site was significant in the Bronze Age.

To wrap up, the short version, so fact and story don't blur.

For all the fascination, one caveat belongs here: Diggle and Underhill are not neutral observers. Both have worked on Bittlestone's hypothesis for twenty years, and the paper appeared in the Antigone Journal, an open forum for classics, in which the authors themselves present their results. The geoscience, the boreholes and datings, carries weight here, because it proves when the valley was under water. The linguistic argument that Homer never calls Ithaca an island is, by contrast, an interpretation, and the authors themselves put it that way: it is a "conclusion."

Anyone who thinks the result through also notices: it doesn't answer whether Odysseus existed or whether Homer meant a real place without knowing it exactly. It only says that the description in the poem fits Paliki better than Ithaki. The question thus remains open, and after more than 2,000 years of dispute it is not settled by this result either.

The search for Ithaca shows how a poem shapes a map. That's why every season in HistoryBytes is split into five categories, and this story touches all five: Wilhelm Dörpfeld as a person, Paliki on Kefalonia as a place, the publication of 4 July 2026 as an event, Homer's geography as an idea, the papyrus fragment of the Odyssey from the 3rd century BC in the British Library as an object. That's how the Echoes of Olympus season builds the whole picture of a world in which myth and landscape run into each other.

Odysseus needed ten years to get home. Researchers have been looking for that home for more than two millennia. Perhaps it lies on the island that bears the name today, perhaps on a peninsula in the west of Kefalonia, perhaps it is a place Homer put together from stories. The boreholes destroyed one beautiful idea, the channel, and opened another: that the Greeks moved the name Ithaca without noticing. Whether Odysseus really lived, nobody knows. But that his homeland is still being searched for after 3,000 years says a lot about how firmly Homer shaped the landscape of Greece.