The release of Christopher Nolan’s *The Odyssey* has brought back into the spotlight a question that historians, geographers, and cartographers have been grappling with for nearly three millennia: Did the route that Homer attributes to Odysseus on his return from Troy actually exist, or is it purely a literary construct? Ithaca itself is a mystery: the island of that name in the Ionian Sea is mountainous, whereas Homer describes a low-lying land facing west…
A debate that dates back to antiquity itself
The debate is almost as old as the poem itself. According to the website culturaclasica.com, even in ancient times, the cartographers Eratosthenes—the first to calculate the circumference of the Earth—and Ptolemy, the historian Polybius, and the geographer Strabo advocated different interpretations of the eternal question: Is *The Odyssey* a true story interspersed with myths, or is it the other way around?
The debate continued for centuries until, during the Renaissance, the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius mapped out Odysseus’s entire journey in his *Theatrum Orbis Terrarum*. To make the route fit, he even invented an island west of Corfu where Ogygia, Calypso’s refuge, was supposed to be located. That fictional island, despite not existing, continued to appear on maps throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Spanish Settings of the Myth
In the 20th century, the French Hellenist and diplomat Victor Bérard took this endeavor to an unprecedented extreme: between 1901 and 1912, he sailed the Mediterranean aboard his own yacht, studying winds, currents, and distances to empirically demonstrate that Homeric geography corresponded to actual routes. His conclusion was that the myths of *The Odyssey* derived from Phoenician trade routes, and he identified Ogygia with our little island of Perejil, off the Strait of Gibraltar.
And he is not the only one to place Odysseus on our shores. Professor Peter T. Struck of the University of Pennsylvania proposed in 2000 to map the cultural significance of each setting for an Archaic Greek. On his map, the underworld is located on the Iberian Peninsula—the edge of the known world for the Greeks—and not in southern Italy, as Bérard had suggested. Struck also places the islands of Circe and Calypso in our Balearic Islands.
The interactive map showing these locations in Spain can be found at this link.
The “real” map: from the academic consensus
Despite these discrepancies, there is a more or less general consensus—as noted by the Encyclopædia Britannica—regarding the possible correspondence between the episodes in the poem and real-life locations in the Mediterranean:
- Troy → Hisarlık, Turkey
- Cicones → Thrace (southwestern Balkans)
- Lotophagi → Djerba, an island off the coast of Tunisia
- Polyphemus → near Mount Etna, eastern Sicily
- Eolo → Lipari, islands north of Sicily
- Laestrygonians → Formia, Italy
- Circe → Ponza, an island off the coast of western Italy
- The Underworld → Lake Averno, near Naples
- Sirens → Li Galli islets, southwest Italy
- Scylla and Charybdis → Strait of Messina
- Ganado del Sol → Sicily
- Calypso → Gozo, an island near Malta
- Phaeacians → Corfu, Ionian Islands
According to this interpretation, Odysseus’s journey focuses primarily on three countries: Turkey, the starting point near the ruins of Troy; Italy, the setting for many of the most famous episodes—Scylla and Charybdis, the Laestrygonians, Circe—; and Greece, the story’s final destination.
The interactive map provided by the Encyclopædia Britannica can be found at this link.
The truth is that, nearly three thousand years after it was written, the Odyssey still defies any definitive interpretation. As the poem’s own cartographic tradition reminds us, each era has projected onto its verses its own way of understanding the unknown world—and will likely continue to do so
Our favorite interactive map, thanks to its clarity and ease of navigation, is the one provided by Xataca.com, which you can explore below:
