Spyridon Marinatos: Paliki was Ithaka

I'm not the only one who thinks that the peninsular called Paliki was once the illustrious Ithaka. Even Spyridon Marinatos (1901- 1974) thought so.

Marinatos was a Greek archaeologist, specializing in Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations. He is best known for leading excavations at Akrotiri on Santorini (1967–74), where he died in a tragic fall. Akrotiri was a wealthy city in the Bronze Age until it was destroyed and covered in ash by the explosive eruption of the volcano in about 1500 BC.

Remember, Homer wrote that "Around are many islands, close to each other, Doulichion and Same and wooded Zacynthos", "Ithaka itself lies low, furthest to sea. Towards dusk." and "the rest, apart, face dawn and sun.”.

But modern Ithaki is not low-lying, it is mountainous; it is not the furthest out to sea and it does not face towards dusk; nor do the nearby islands face towards the dawn and sun. And where are Doulichion and Same?

A frequent co-worker from Marinatos, Antonis Rigatos (1927), remembers clearly what Marinatos once upon a time said: “He told us that this land – Paliki – was once ancient Ithaka, and that with our excavations we were looking for clues.”

But if Paliki – the western peninsula of Kefalonia – was once ancient Ithaca, many problems are solved at once. This concept was already mentioned by Spyridon Marinatos in the 1950s.

Paliki is low-lying – the highest mountain is Mount Lakties at just 525 metres. It is on the western side of Kefalonia, and the other islands lie to the east, facing dawn and the sun. Eastern Kefalonia glories in a water-front town called Sami – which suggests that eastern Kefalonia could plausibly have been called Same after the name of the town, as was often the case in ancient times. And the island called Ithaki today could instead have carried the name Doulichion – as indeed some late-mediaeval cartographers have suggested. If you believe these ideas, Homer’s poetic descriptions are a much better fit with the geography.

[Bronze coin from Pale]

The Paliki peninsula owes its name to the city of Pale (Πάλη), one of the four (Pale, Krane, Same, Pronnoi) leading cities (or tetrapoleis) of Kefalonia in the classical Greek and Hellenistic periods. This division of the island appears to have been a very ancient one, since a legend derived the names of the four cities from the names of the four sons of Cephalus[1]. Pale was mentioned by both Herodotus and Thucydides in their histories, and the city was located on and around a small hill overlooking the sea, just north of modern Lixouri on the southwestern coast of Paliki. The territory around Pale was called Paleis (Παλείς).

While Marinatos regarded Paliki as ancient Ithaka, he never mentioned that Paliki must have been an island.

[1] Smith: Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, illustrated by numerous engravings on wood - 1854.