Ithaca

Nowhere in Europe is really isolated any more, but Ithaca remains hard to reach. The boat from Patras takes 4 hours. Patras itself has no airport and is four hours by road from Athens, or fourteen hours by ferry from Bari. We came through Bari, which involved long waits between connections and a lumbering run along the waterfront to the ferry in Patras, with wheeled case bouncing behind. Worth it, though, to avoid eight hours in Patras, a town of determined, industrial ugliness.

When you reach Ithaca, there is only one easily accessible town. It is delightfully untouristed. There are very few remains, and no uncontested Homeric sites: that’s to say that there are places that are certainly Mycenaean, but none that can be firmly identified with sites in the Odyssey. We know Odysseus must have been there, if he was king of the island, but we can’t know where he would have thought he was.


So one afternoon we drove to the North of the island, to a place known, on no good grounds, as the School of Homer, where there is a Mycenean wall topped by the ruins of a Venetian fort. People lived there 4,7000 years ago, and the mountains around can hardly have changed at all. They may have changed a bit, since this is earthquake country, and one promising site for Odysseus’ hall vanished into the sea, as a Byzantine city, in 973AD.

The School of Homer is not developed as a tourist site: you reach it down a mile or so of dirt and rubble track that runs through scrub forest. At the end there is a metal sign, which has been blasted with a shotgun and so has swung round to point further down the road. We walked for about a kilometre further down the track through the delicious spicy heat of a Mediterranean hillside before giving up and walking back to the sign. Far beneath, the sea had been put through God’s vivid filter, and at one bend in the road the goat bells swelled from the woods below us.

Returning to the sign, I noticed the tiny track up into the woods to the School of Homer, and climbed to it. Byron was here, on August 14 1823; but this was not nearly as odd as the feeling that any king of Ithaca must have stood where I was, and looked across these valleys. To see with physical eyes the view that Odysseus saw is quite incomparably strange, and more strange because I am so used to seeing it with Tennyson’s eyes:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an ag

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4 Responses to Ithaca

  1. Simon Sarmiento says:

    But what did you do in Bari? We have had wonderful seafood there, not to mention attending the annual festival of the bakers of Puglia, in St Nicholas church.

  2. el Patron says:

    Bari on Easter Monday is not a happening town. We wandered, with luggage, through the narrow streets. I had a filthy cold, and retired to a café: the girls took photographs and played Cool Italian bingo: points awarded for

    • riding a scooter
    • in shades
      (extra points if the street lighting is on)
    • smoking
    • while talking into telefonino
    • and squeezing girlfriend
    • having a child as passenger
    • or a dog

    All points vanish if anyone is wearing a helmet.

  3. Why are the comments disabled on the Dennett post? is it because it’s a sleazy bit of trash journalism?

  4. el Patron says:

    No. It’s an MT thing, now fixed. I think I turned them off by default when I got a burst of comment spam some while ago.

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