Ithaca's location discovered? Researchers says it's on island of Cephalonia

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 yesterday.

The original contours of Ithaca have been distorted over the millenniums by a series of earthquakes that raised land levels, converting it into a peninsula of Cephalonia called Paliki.

The researchers said the topographical changes hid the identity of Ithaca from generations of historians and archaeologists tracing the epic journey of Odysseus around 1200 B.C.

The team, led by Robert Bittlestone, chairman of the management consultancy Metapraxis, has identified the geographical locations of 26 specific Ithaca locations mentioned by Homer, they said.

"The 'Odyssey' fits Paliki like a glove," Bittlestone said here 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 get sufficient financing.

The search for the location of Ithaca has been in progress at least since the time of the first century Greek historian Strabo, who placed it east of Cephalonia (Kefallinia in Greek), on the modern day island of Ithaca (Ithiki in Greek). But each tentative assignment of a real location to the story has required bending the geography of the "Odyssey" to fit the location. 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 [Ithaca] never existed and 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?"