Where was the Ithaca of ‘The Odyssey’? A study pins down the true location of Odysseus’s kingdom in Greece

Since its premiere, Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ has already established itself as one of the biggest cinematic events of the year. This ambitious adaptation of Homer’s epic poem has brought renewed attention to Odysseus’s legendary return to Ithaca after the Trojan War—a journey that has fascinated countless readers for nearly three millennia. But setting aside myth and fiction, one big question continues to divide historians and archaeologists: Where was Ithaca actually located?

Ulysses’ Ithaca may not be where we’ve always thought it was: that’s what a recent study says

For centuries, Homer’s Ithaca has been identified as the small Greek island that still bears that name in the Ionian Sea. However, the geographical descriptions found in both ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘The Iliad’ do not always match this territory: the present-day island is mountainous and faces east, whereas Odysseus describes his homeland as a low-lying land situated to the west. These discrepancies have fueled numerous theories about the true location of the hero’s kingdom, which may lie in a place very different from the one currently shown on maps.

A recent article published in the journal Antigone once again turns the spotlight on the Paliki Peninsula, located west of the island of Kefalonia. British researchers James Diggle—professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge—and John Underhill—professor at the University of Aberdeen—argue that Homer never explicitly referred to Ithaca as an “island,” but rather used terms equivalent to “land,” “homeland,” “region,” or “domain.” Their hypothesis suggests that Ithaca was not an independent island territory, but rather an area of Kefalonia that corresponds to present-day Paliki.

If this theory were confirmed, it would not change the literary core of ‘The Odyssey’ but would force us to view the outcome of its protagonist’s long journey from a new perspective. Odysseus would not have returned to the island we now call Ithaca, but to a peninsula located several kilometers further west, part of a larger territory. Furthermore, some references in the poem that for centuries have been considered vague or purely mythological might in fact correspond to a specific geography that was misinterpreted by later translations and readings.

The Paliki hypothesis is still far from being a definitive consensus, but it combines literary, geographical, and geological arguments that reopen one of the great mysteries of antiquity. Nearly three thousand years after Homer recounted Odysseus’s eventful return, we may not yet have finished searching for Ithaca: it took the hero ten long years to return home, and we have spent centuries trying to figure out where his home really was.

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