The 25-year odyssey to prove Homer’s kingdom was not an island (Emily Prescott, July 04 2026, Times uk)
So Bittlestone spent an afternoon and evening in Diggle’s college rooms laying out his theory. By midnight Diggle asked to sleep on it. “By the next morning, I was able to email him and say, ‘I slept on this and this is absolutely brilliant and we must pursue it.’”Bittlestone had noticed that Homer’s highly detailed geographic descriptions in the Odyssey could not be reconciled with modern-day Ithaki. For instance, Homer states that Ithaca was the furthest west of three islands and the furthest out to sea. Modern Ithaki is the closest to the Greek mainland and the furthest east.
Homer describes Odysseus’s home as low-lying. Modern Ithaki is mountainous.Bittlestone argued that the Paliki peninsula on the next-door island of Kefalonia perfectly matched Homer’s descriptions. It faces the sea, is the furthest west, and is low-lying. There was only one problem: Paliki is a peninsula, and everyone “knew” Ithaca was an island.
To solve this, Bittlestone theorised that during the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 BC — the era of the Trojan War — Paliki was separated from the rest of Kefalonia by a marine channel. Because Kefalonia sits directly over two tectonic plates, Bittlestone suggested that massive earthquake-induced rockfalls had eventually filled the channel in, turning the island into a peninsula.Next Bittlestone approached Professor John Underhill, a geoscientist. Underhill said: “Robert called me and started the conversation by saying: ‘I’m not a crank,’ and when you hear that you think: ‘Oh my word …’ He’d found my PhD based on the geology of western Greece via Google and introduced me to the project.”