Ithaca: the island of many happy returns
Three millennia after Odysseus’s homecoming, the tiny, serene, Ionian island is still drawing people back
I arrived on Ithaca having decided, out of some writerly cliché-avoiding vanity, to write about the island without mentioning the Odyssey. Already from the boat taxi, we could see the place was beautiful: wooded hills, emerald shores, secluded bays. This island, I thought, might attract tourists thanks to its legendary name, but in substance it will have moved on from that. I expected the Odyssey to be no more than a faded film poster peeling off the back wall of a fast-ferry ticket office.
Ithaca is very green, rugged and hilly. It is also bizarrely shaped: imagine a dumbbell painted by Salvador Dalí. Because of the way it’s often possible to look from its shores across the water and see another part of Ithaca in the distance, I found the island’s geography confusing.
The beautiful place we stayed at, for instance, has the feel of a house perched on the shores of a mountain lake. Without a map, you are never quite sure if you are looking at the mainland, at the much larger neighbouring island of Kefalonia, at Lefkada or back at Ithaca itself.
Our host, Vassilis Lazaris, an enterprising thirtysomething with a kind and infectious smile, dispels the first of my assumptions. Compared to its neighbours, the island has very little tourist activity. For a long time there was only one hotel on Ithaca (boldly called “Hotel”); now there are a couple, some guesthouses, and restaurants and tavernas that, outside the peak summer months, mainly cater to the 3,000-strong local population.
One of the island’s villages, Kioni, boasts a postcard-pretty harbour and is popular with sailing boats, but much of the rest of the island is tourist-innocent. Vassilis tells us that when he and his family recently decided to return to Ithaca, after many years in Prague and then Athens, and to invest in tourism, they felt like pioneers. He speaks of trying to corral local stakeholders into committing to schedules, to having regular opening hours; he finds it amusing rather than maddening. During our stay, we overhear him several times good-naturedly trying to lure someone over from a taverna to open the doors of their own establishment for us.
On the first day, we are supposed to go on a tour of the island. We meet our guide, Spyros Couvaras, at breakfast, an affable, mild-mannered man, as interested in where we are from as we are in his island. When asked about the day’s programme he mentions some villages, which sounds innocent enough. But it’s a trap: no sooner are we off than Spyros pulls out ancient maps and printouts with vertigo-inducing timelines (the “recent” end is the Byzantine empire).
The hilltop villages, I realise, are mostly an excuse to reach a high enough vantage point from which to speculate about the possible location of a certain travel-prone busybody’s palace. I ostentatiously turn to taking photos of flowers and butterflies; it’s my friends who ask questions.
I suppose the reason I expected the Odyssey to be irrelevant to Ithaca today was that I assumed historical matters were more or less settled. What I didn’t know was that even after Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of Troy in the late 19th century, there’s still no evidence any of the Homeric characters existed. The only thing archaeologists agree on is that there was a place called Troy that matches the Homeric location and chronology, and it was destroyed by war. That’s the full extent of what has been reasonably proved.
Spyros, who does believe there was an Ithacan king called Odysseus, is fair-minded enough to inform us that there’s no full agreement even about the location of Ithaca, that some historians believe the name, as used by the ancients, refers to another island. That pesky topography, again: at any one point on the island, the view mimics that of other islands.
We interrupt our tour of archaeological sites for late lunch in the sleepy hilltop village of Anogi. The old kafeneion we enter is interesting enough to shift attention from pre-antiquity to pre-tourism. Fat pickled artichokes sit in jars on the counter, and food is served on metal plates. There is a TV and a 1950s fridge, family photos on the walls, books lying about, shelves with bags of flour, sugar and salt for sale, crates of tomatoes with handwritten price tags: I can’t decide if it’s someone’s living room or a grocer’s.
Sofia Moraiti, the owner and cook, has an air of humble nobility. We have the best mezedes I’ve ever had (simple: artichokes, fresh local cheese, grilled peppers, salami, olives, a cucumber-less tzatziki, and excellent tsipouro), while my photographer friends go absolutely bananas taking photos of the place.
I take the chance to ask Spyros about his background and interest in local history and he tells us he has lived in Athens for most of his life, working as an editor and proofreader, and only returned to Ithaca a decade ago. He supports himself by private tutoring and the guided tours.
He seems happy in a calm, serene way, and unintentionally deadpan: after asking us if we have cigarettes, he concludes ruefully that “everyone I might have borrowed a smoke from is dead”. Spyros is obviously and sweetly a history geek: at any given time, the geography that is at the fore of his mind is the Homeric one. I get the feeling that if someone were to shout “Phrygian invasion!”, he’d know which way to look.
The following day we are due to go on a boat tour (we all note Vassilis’s relief when our boat shows up). We’ve had glimpses of the beaches from the hilltops we visited the previous day, and what seemed suspect from a distance is outright unbelievable from close range. The waters off Ithaca defy anyone’s colour vocabulary: turquoise, ice-blue, emerald, baby-blue, indigo; I could already anticipate having to explain that no, I’ve not messed about with the photo settings. At times we were tantalisingly close even to Homer’s famous “wine-dark” sea.
Our skipper, George Lilas, explains that the diving is excellent here, and the range and intensity of colour has to do with the cleanliness of the water and the colour and texture of the sea floor. He is rightfully proud at having recently helped clean a beach left full of debris near an abandoned fish farm; we visit the cleaned beach and he shows us the sinister “before” photos. George, too, has returned to the island after years abroad, including working in Florida and doing a masters in renewable energy engineering in Edinburgh.
At the next archaeological site we visit, just outside the northern village of Stavros, Spyros tells us of the attempts at finding Odysseus’s palace, starting with Schliemann, who came to Ithaca emboldened by his Trojan success, and ending with the most recent efforts. The latter unearthed a Mycenaean structure that fits the relevant timeline but which, according to some experts, lacks the grandeur of a royal abode.
We wander among large, pockmarked building blocks that to my eye are almost indistinguishable from boulders. The remains of an arch is the most visibly man-made entity. Odysseus’s palace, if that’s what we’re looking at, is very nearly dust.
For the duration of the trip, I’m too embarrassed to confess to our hosts that I was not going to mention Homer. Instead, I keep my mouth shut and remember Christopher Hitchens’ cautionary anecdote of his trip to communist Prague, his ambition not to mention what every writer knows about Prague: that it used to be Kafka’s home, and that dictatorships are Kafkaesque.
On that trip, Hitchens went on to be arrested for no obvious reason, and was refused an explanation by the Czech authorities: supremely Kafkaesque by anyone’s standards. On Ithaca, listening to Spyros, it feels stupid and naive to have believed that a place’s history would somehow just peel off its present.
I start seeing signs to that effect everywhere. At some point, one of us makes the offhand remark that many shops and tavernas are called Odysseus or Telemachus but none are called Penelope. Vassilis’s earnest answer is that Ithacans suspect Penelope wasn’t entirely faithful to Odysseus, and therefore are less inclined to honour her. This bizarre telescoping of history: imagine still gossiping about Penelope!
The last day we’re at the top of a hill, again with a view of the sea and unidentifiable landmasses, when Spyros starts quoting Homer. Specifically, the parts that reference the surrounding views from Odysseus’s palace. It’s more than a little thrilling to realise that the ancient description fits the landscape before us.
Apart from the poetic frisson, this is what makes the hunt for the palace so enticing, even for an amateur: most of the clues are there for all to see and speculate on, in nature and in Homer’s poems. And the clues might really work, given that they once helped unearth Troy. It should feel hopeless to look for the house of someone who may or may not have lived 3,000 years ago, yet here I am, tempted to make off with poor unsuspecting Spyros’s laminated maps and Homeric quotes and embark on a life of scrutinising the Ionian horizon.
We return to Sofia’s for dinner. She has made a traditional dish, chicken and kid slow-cooked in clay pots. It is delicious, Sofia is a little tipsy, and we tourists are again tipsily amazed that this kafeneion exists. It is rare to feel so at ease and present in a place, without ulterior anythings: you really go there to be there.
And, because by now I expect a certain answer, I ask Sofia whether she has ever left the island. Now and then sneakily tugging at her mask to puff on a cigarette, Sofia delivers the expected answer: she has lived in Italy, France, Canada and is from the tiny village we’re in, Anogi. But when I ask her why she returned, she surprises me: what a question! She was always going to return. Sofia makes her life in other countries and on other continents sound as though she merely popped out for cigarettes.
So: go to this island that the locals love, that they were dying to return to. They’ve seen the world, and they like it here the most. There’s the parallel with Odysseus’s obsessive journey home, of course, but the other thing that struck me about the Ithacans we met is that they seemed genuinely at peace, in a serene, uncomplicated way.
In a travelling context it’s usually the tourist who is the vulnerable one — there is something childlike about being new in a place, being ignorant of the language and the customs. You are exposed. But on Ithaca, it was we tourists who were left feeling intensely protective of the locals. I would love for others to visit this beautiful island and meet these people, but I also found myself wanting to urge future visitors to be kind to them.
