PALEOKASTRITSA - CORFU - GREECE

Odyssey

Her Odysseus halted for the last time on the home-ward journey to his kingdom of Ithaca, some three thousand years ago. A glimpse of the Monastery surrounded by olives, cypresses, ilex oak, vines and figs and scented by sage and rosemary and from within by citrus fruits and ubiquitous colourful flowers and blooms, reveals a strange semblance to the description of Homer's majestic gardens.

However the convincing evidence is plainly manifested by the breathtaking panoramic views from various vantage points within the Monastery precincts: across the turquoise blue water of the coastline extending south.

Close by in a similar direction a rock emerging from the sea whose silhouette resembles th ship (in full sail) which was petrified by the wrathful Poseidon on its return from Ithaca; gurther west an expanse of dark blue sea stretching to the horizon, which lights up in a spectacular crimson fire ball as the sun sets into the ocean; to the north the slopes rising steeply to Mount Araklis ( the punishment mountain described by Homer which the vengeful Poseidon not content with turning Odysseus' ship to stone, positioned in order to cut the Phaeacians completely off from the rest of the World).

The view looking down from Angelocastron on Mount Araklis is even more impressive and illuminating. Louis Golding (in his Good-Bye-to Ithaka sums up the whole scene succinctly in his own inimitable prose: «Learning over a rock which seemed as far from earth as from sky, there it all was, the Phaeacian land, so reduced in scale by our great height that it might have been drawn for us by one of the cartographers of Alcinous himself. From the Bay of Liapades the coast runs east to west and slightly north so far as Angelokastron, the sheer cliff whence we werw gazing now.

Paleokastritsa history