Ithaka
Ithaka is known to every schoolboy as the home island of Odysseus, and even if not all scholars can agree on the exact location of the sites associated with the Odyssey, this island has as much claim as any of receiving the homage due to that epic hero and his world. The men of Ithaka still go off to sea and return with their knowledge and languages acquired abroad, thus giving the island a touch of worldliness. Yet Ithaka remains a typical Greek island in many respects – the alternation of barren peaks with green slopes, pebbled beaches and sandy shore, mountain villages and coastal ports. Ithaka also has a kind of hardy independence: it has not surrendered to tourism but gives its hospitality in the traditional Greek way. After all, the people of Ithaka can claim descent from a man who saw too much to be overwhelmed by some people wearing shorts and snapping pictures.
Ithaka is not especially large, only some 120 square kms and only some 5000 inhabitants. In its shape it is almost like two islands joined by an isthmus. The main city and capital is Vathy (also known as Ithaki), with almost half the island’s population and most of the hotels. Vathy sits at the end of a narrow inlet, and the ships from Cephalonia and Patras come right up to the harbour ringed by buildings. The town here at the harbor is fairly new; the Venetians originally built their town on the high ground above. Vathy boasts a little museum, a cathedral with a carved ikonostasis, and on an islet in the harbor the old lazaretto, or quarantine station, that has been converted into a church.
Many of the excursions on Ithaka are to sites named after the locales and incidents in the Odyssey. Again, even if scholars question whether there were the exact places, they are rewarding enough in themselves. The Grotto of the Nymphs, for instance (known today by Ithakas as the Marmarospilis, “marble cave”) is some 4 km west of Vathy, about 200 meters up a slope over the Bay of Dexia. This bay is claimed to be the Phorkys where the Phaeacians placed Odysseus after bringing him here from Scheria (today’s Corfu); Odysseus hid his gifts of bronze and gold in the Grotto of the Nymphs before going to his palace. The cave can be entered, and it has one 16-meter wide chamber with stalactites.
Another excursion takes you out of Vathy south via Anemodouri up to the Fountain of Arethusa (also known today as Perapigadi); here the swineherd Eumaios brought his pigs for water; an hour’s walk to the south would bring you to the plateau of Marathia, where his pigsties were located. From there a 40-minute walk down to the sea brings one to the Bay of Ayios Andreas where Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, is claimed to have disembarked upon his return from Pylos; to avoid Penelope’s suitors, he made his way up from the bay to the pigsties at Marathia.
Yet another excursion is to Mt. Aetos and the ruins of Alakomenai. This mountain – some 670 meters at its peak – is on the lower of the two bodies of land that make up Ithaka. Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy and Mycenae, came here in 1878 and found the remains of walls that he claimed were the remains of the palace of Odysseus; Ithakans still refer to them as kastro tou Odysseos (“castle of Odysseus”), but the remains are now known to date only to about 700 BC. Remains of a sanctuary-temple from the Archaic Period have also been found nearby.
Also to be found on this lower island is the little port of Andri and the mountain village of Perakhori; near this latter is the Monastery of Taxiarkhon. Moving up along the isthmus – Gulf of Molo to the right, M t. N irito ahead – you come to the northern part of Ithaka and its main town of Stavros; with only some 350 inhabitants, it sits in the hills above the Bay of Polis. On the northwest shore of the bay is the cave-sanctuary, Spilia Louizou, where archaeologists found large quantities of pottery from Mycenaean through Roman periods; the most notable finds were 12 tripods from the Geometric Period and a shard inscribed with “my vow to Odysseus” – the only such ancient inscription referring to Odysseus and suggesting that a hero-cult might have grown up at this cave. Down in the bay itself, literally underwater, are remains of a port city.
North of little Stavros is another site, Pelikata, inhabited from before 2000 BC through Mycenaean times; it was also the site of a necropolis from the Classical through Hellenistic periods; finally it was occupied in Venetian times. A small museum contains the finds from Pelikata as well as from the cave-santuary, Spilia Louizou. Beyond Pelikata is a circle of stones that archaeologists now believe are the remains of a 6th century BC tower but that long ago came to be known as “the school of Homer,” the suggestion being that the blind bard re¬cited his poetry here.
There are still other interesting excursions and sights around Ithaka. In the mountain village of Exoghi is the spring of Melanidhro; in the village of Anoyi there is the Church of the Dormition of the Virgin. Kioni is a quaint fishing village while the beach at Frikes has been taken over by the Club Mediterrane. And for those who feel up to a modest climb only some 600 meters – there is Mt. Nerito, with a monastery at its summit that claims an ikon allegedly by El Greco but has a genuinely spectacular view. It would be a fitting way to end a visit to Ithaka.
