Odysseus's island home has changed hands more often than he changed ships
Ithaca, the rugged Ionian island most people link with Homer's Odysseus, covers just 96 square kilometres and had 2,862 residents in 2021. Yet Romans, Byzantines, Normans, Ottomans, Venetians, the French, Russians and British all ruled it before it finally joined Greece in 1864.
The island lies off the northeast coast of Kefalonia, west of mainland Greece, and among the seven principal Ionian Islands only Paxi is smaller. Its capital is Vathy. Modern Ithaca is generally identified with the Ithaca of the Odyssey, whose hero spends the poem struggling to get home, though scholars have proposed other candidates. Italians once called it Piccola Cephallonia, little Kefalonia, a sign of how closely its fate tracked its larger neighbour.
People have lived there since the 4th millennium BCE. Remains of walls and a road survive from the late Neolithic and Early Helladic periods, and in Mycenaean times the island may have headed a small kingdom, the realm Homer gives to Odysseus. During the classical Greek centuries a town called Alalcomenae grew up at Aetos in the south, and coins stamped with the island's name and an image of Odysseus suggest it governed itself.
Rome occupied it in the 2nd century BCE, and the Byzantine Empire followed. In the Middle Ages pirate raids drove islanders into mountain villages. Latin lords passed it around with Kefalonia: Margaritone of Brindisi probably took it in 1185, then the Orsini family, John of Gravina in 1324, and in 1357 the Neapolitan courtier Leonardo Tocco. Ottoman forces arrived in 1479 and held it from 1484 to 1499, when a Venetian and Spanish fleet besieged the islands; Venice ruled from 1500.
The modern era brought rapid turnover. France took it under the 1797 Treaty of Campo Formio; a Russian and Ottoman force under admirals Fyodor Ushakov and Kadir Bey drove them out in 1798, creating the Septinsular Republic. France returned in 1807, Britain seized it in 1809, and after 1815 it belonged to the British-protected United States of the Ionian Islands. Islanders asked to join Greece in 1830, and the 1864 Treaty of London finally handed all seven islands over as a goodwill gesture to Greece's new king, George I.
Source: Ithaca (island)
