which is KEFALONIA and Municipality of Homeric Ithaca which is PALIKI OF KEFALONIA.
HOW OFF THE VENETIANS WERE...
Venice gave her the name, Ithaca,
earlier they called her Little Cephalonia
and Tsimaratos discovered the Val di Compare
and the research stagnated in the transparent waters...
I remind you that the Venetians are the destroyers of the greatest temple of the goddess Athena, the PARTHENON of the ACROPOLIS of Athens, on 26-9-1687 by Francesco Morosini. I also remind you that the Venetians themselves were the ones who declared this same man - perhaps to honor and reward him? - the Doge of VENICE the following year... Venice that Napoleon ultimately 'flattened'.
In 1500, the Venetian Admiral Benedetto Pessaro finally captured Cephalonia despite the grim prospects, when a handful of Turco-Albanians were initially holding St. George’s Castle with success. Fortunately, the great Conqueror of Granada, Gonzalo de Córdoba — eight years earlier together with Ponce de León — came to overturn the situation. From then on he became the general commander of the Spanish fleet, a hero of Castile and viceroy in Naples, and he delivered Cephalonia to the Doge of Venice.
It was as in the Persian Wars: without the Spartans, the Athenians would still be viewing their city from Salamis.
The same happened in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, when the Venetian ships, already tied together with grappling hooks, were heading toward Constantinople laden with rich spoils. In the end, the Spaniard Don Juan d’Asturias, refusing to let his left wing — resting on the Echinades — be broken, routed the Turks and freed the captive ships of his Venetian coreligionists.
Both times, the Spaniards, having their minds set on transatlantic ambitions, handed over as spoils to the Venetians the lands of the countries they had liberated.
Among these was the island disputed between the Sultan and the Doge, known by the names Val di Compare and Cefalonia Picchiola — deserted for years — and, as someone suspiciously suggested, it was like the Imia islets: “Let no human foot step there, for war will break out.”
Thinking cleverly, the Venetians — and perhaps after taking a look at the names that Cephalonia had borne in earlier times — named it Ithaca, by paraphrasing the word Teacchi… Ithaca, that is, the homeland of the resourceful Odysseus, king of the Cephallenians.
To attract settlers to this borderland island, however, that ideological name alone was not enough (just as we might say “the Promised Land,” in the way the Westerners gathered people onto the territories of Palestine in order to have a bridgehead toward the Arabs’ oil — what we call Israel…).
…They granted at least five years of tax exemptions, and apparently did not oblige the locals to adopt the surname ending -atos.
Soon the island became a refuge for the persecuted. Souliotes came. Here, Odysseas Androutsos was baptized...
During the years of the Revolution, Lord Byron acknowledged: “Now that we have (at last) found both Troy and Ithaca!...”
The Venetians did whatever they wished — they were the Most Serene Republic, an empire — but had they not read Homer?
The Athenians had done the same, around 500 BC, and it did not last: it was deserted — it vanished!
That is also the reason why, for almost a hundred years now, sixty different theories have been formulated about this place!
It is a world record, and moreover, most of them were proposed by researchers without ulterior motives, moved only by love for Homer’s text, …for the Odyssey, which is written with such sincerity and which, even after so many centuries, provides true information — confirmed by archaeological excavation and cross-verified by non-Greek sources, such as the Egyptians and the Hittites.
NOTE:
Many ancient names of Cephalonia have survived with the ending -klata, or without the -ta, simply as -kli. The element -kla always derives from κλέος (glory, fame), or έκλυε (was heard of) in the Homeric dialect — meaning “a place renowned for something.” For example: Faraklata, Ratzakli, Kourouklata, Arakli — even Thekli, an area that dominates the view (thea). Where do I want to conclude? The Latin word Teacchi = Thiaki, is not certain to derive from Ithaca. It could very well come from the Greek word theasi (θέαση, “view”), referring to a place with a view due to its elevation!
So what was it that so many researchers didn’t like, prompting them to start searching?
That modern Ithaca is steep, rugged, and “tucked” into the embrace of imposing Cephalonia. It does not stand out; it has no “beautiful sunsets,” being overshadowed to the west by Sami, Pylaros, and Erissos of the prefecture of Cephalonia. It is not ΕΥΔΕΙΕΛΟΣ, eu-deielos, with όμορφα δειλινά, with beautiful sunsets—It doesn't have beautiful sunsets, and that's why it is not clearly visible!
… It is not low-lying (χθαμαλή).
…And—this is the final blow—it is not the westernmost point of Odysseus’s kingdom. It does not lie toward the setting sun, toward zophos!
It was a coarse administrative decision made for political reasons.
As the philologist Mrs. Angeliki Zolota wonders in the book The Island with the Straight Lines:
“Geographically, is the so-called Ithaca capable of sustaining the existence of an ancient kingdom? Does it have terrain easy for walking, for communication, for vineyards, for pig farms, for quiet streams? Across from it lies Cephalonia, with the large and gentle Paliki peninsula. Why would an ancient bold leader not have chosen that instead? Where do the descriptions of the Odyssey fit? The distances, the little harbors? The accessible land for easy walking and quick arrival? What exactly do population migration patterns show?”
And as ordinary people keep asking:
- Would the Cephalonians and Zakynthians, together with Dulichium, have allowed even for a month some man from Thiaki to rule over them—as Odysseus did for twenty years without having lost his throne?
And I answer:
- Yes—only if he had discovered nuclear weapons!
And a man from Thiaki might interject: “But the suitors only wanted Penelope!”
And I would reply again: “Yet the most insolent of them, Antinous, also wanted the palace—which in the Odyssey is regarded as hubris!”
And finally, I ask all of you:
- Could that incomparable palace, where the “goddess” lived—the woman courted by 108 suitors—possibly be found in Thiaki? And where would such a famous royal house have buried its rulers? …In Mazarakata of Cephalonia? …In Tzannata? …Or perhaps in Kontogenada? Only in Delos, much later, is there evidence of burials on a neighboring island. So I am right about the “nuclear weapons”: the leaders of that “Ithaca” were far ahead of their time—they had inaugurated cremation of the dead, which is why no Mycenaean tombs have been found on Thiaki.
All the rulers—except one… Odysseus! He, ever resourceful, escaped the custom, took his seal stone, and was buried at Tzannata, Pronnoi, Cephalonia!
Let us not return to the details. The proof that the Tomb of Odysseus is located at Tzannata is presented in the appendix of the book The Island with the Straight Lines, pages 346–357, in the book where we analyze Book 24 (ραψωδία τ’) of the Odyssey, and also at https://homericithaca.com/threads/105/.
In the book 'The Samikos', this is taken as a given, in order to interpret events of the First Migration Period.
Therefore, since according to the seer Tiresias, Odysseus rows far away from his land and builds his tomb… and since he plants his oar upon the mound, implying that he then walks back home on foot, his kingdom was, unfortunately, not on present-day Thiaki, but somewhere in Cephalonia.
The involvement of the seer Tiresias makes this hypothesis sacred. Consequently, it is sacrilege that for so many years we have not allowed Odysseus to find his Ithaca upon Cephalonian soil.
ἀνθρώποισι μέλω, καί μευ κλέος οὐρανὸν ἵκει.
Ναιετάω δ᾿ Ἰθάκην εϋδείελον· ἐν δ᾿ ὂρος αὐτῇ
Νήριτον εἰνοσίφυλλον, ἀριπρεπές· ἀμφὶ δὲ νῆσοι
πολλαὶ ναιετάουσι μάλα σχεδὸν ἀλλήλῃσιν,
Δουλίχιόν τε Σάμη τε καὶ ὑλήεσσα Ζάκυνθος.
Αὐτὴ δε χθαμαλὴ πανυπερτάτη εἰν ἁλὶ κεῖται
πρὸς ζόφον, αἱ δέ τ᾿ ἂνευθε πρὸς ἠῶ τ᾿ ἠέλιόν τε,
τρηχεῖ ᾿ , ἀλλ᾿ ἀγαθὴ κουροτρόφος· οὔ τοι ἐγώ γε
ἧς γαίης δύναμαι γλυκερώτερον ἂλλο ἰδέσθαι ...».
Οδύσσεια ι 19-28
... I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, who of all men I composes
the schemes (tricks), and my own glory has reached the heavens.
And I live in Ithaca, the beautiful evening-land; and before it, a mountain,
the deeply shaded Nyrithos, majestic, and around (it)
many islands that are inhabited, one close to another,
and Dulichium and Same and wooded Zakynthos.
And this one is LOW and FURTHER OUT into the sea
to the WEST, while those are in contrast toward the sun and the east;
rugged, yet it nourishes men; for which indeed I
cannot behold anything sweeter upon the earth. ...
Odyssey ι΄(9) 19-28
This article was broadcast on the radio on Wednesday, August 27, 2008, by Free Radio of Kefalonia in a program by journalist Yannis Zervos, on the topic of the ten years of Nikos Livadas Toumasatos' Theory titled "KEFALLONIA, THE REVELATION OF HOMERIC ITHACA. Homer and Odysseus the Kefallonians." At the end of 2008, it became a chapter of the book "HOMERIC ITHACA is PALKI OF KEFALLONIA.
