Why Ithaka

Ithaka is an obvious and perhaps overly literal destination for an odyssey. Odysseus started the trend. He wandered for ten years, battling the most contrary of winds, to get from Troy back home to Ithaka.

Vathy harbour (2003)

There is not a drop of Greek in my blood. But thanks to seven years of the Hellenic Primary School in Harare, I can read and write Greek, and sing Oxi Day songs with gusto. At ten, I was upgraded from the NON-Greek* to the HALF-Greek* class. Half-Greeks* were allowed to read myths in Greek. (*official Hellenic School term)

My Greekness would have ended there, if it weren’t for my best friend, Helena (legitimately in the half-Greek* class). Her paternal grandfather was a Callinicos (the name means ‘sweet victory’), and belonged to a great shipping family from Ithaka.

As a child, I was enraptured, as Helena’s mother, Alice, described Ithaka to us: sparkling waves as seen in The Little Mermaid, the grand house with the best views, and 100 steps straight down to the sea. What else to conjure but a one-house-on-a-hill kind of island, encircled by white pebble beaches and Ionian blue?

In 2002, my family left Zimbabwe for the UK. Six months later, so did Helena's. Tragic as our displacement to Europe was, the Callinicoses found themselves close enough to Ithaka to make it a regular summer destination. The first trip to Ithaka was in July 2003. I volunteered to go. We were there for two weeks. I spent the first week recovering from the fact that Ithaka was not the Callinicoses’ private island. Alice had omitted any detail of other houses or people. The big family house (the grandest in town) had been sold to a family from Athens, so the we were reduced to the smaller, blue house next door.

Me on one of the hundred steps (2003)

2023 marks the 20th summer of Callinicoses in Ithaka. Every March, friends and family from all corners of the world begin plotting their own multi-stage odysseys. In June and July, as would a long-separated flock of sea birds, they reunite in Ithaka, eager for its legend and welcome. For me, with every visit, Ithaka’s mystical hold doubles. Over a long period of rejecting my life away from Zimbabwe, Ithaka was a hot, sage-scented, sparkling refuge for me, that still opens itself up for more adoring each time I go.

One day, when I have some money, I will own a plot, high up with views of the sea. I’ll have a tiny-home amongst olive trees, keep a goat and a donkey, and start a compost business. In the meantime, it seems obvious that I should walk to Ithaka. I hope I arrive by next July and that there are some Callinicoses + Friends waiting for me on the platia at ouzo-o’clock.