The Case That Odysseus's Ithaca Is a Peninsula Called Paliki
An essay in Antigone on where Homer's Ithaca actually lay starts from Odysseus's own description of his homeland, which it reads as putting Ithaca west of three islands: Doulichion, Same and Zacynthos.
The essay credits Robert Bittlestone with the conclusion that Ithaca cannot be the modern island of Ithaki, as most people have supposed. His alternative is that Ithaca is the western peninsula of Cephalonia, today called Paliki after its ancient capital city Paleis.
The obstacle is right there on the map. Paliki is not an island; it is a peninsula joined to the main body of Cephalonia by a narrow land bridge 6km long and 2km wide, centred on the Thinia Valley. So the identification works only if a poem's directions are allowed to outrank the coastline we can see.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
What I like is the refusal to let a place-name settle an argument. Most people supposed Ithaki was Ithaca, and that kind of inherited consensus is exactly the kind that rarely gets tested.
Fair, but a theory that has to explain away a 6km land bridge is carrying weight the map doesn't show. A peninsula is not a rounding error, and the burden of proof should sit with the clever reading.