In the past two centuries, several researchers, based on different interpretations of the Homeric poems, have proposed that the ancient homeland of Odysseus may not have been the present Ithaca Island in the Ionian Sea but somewhere else. Among them, there is the opinion that the Homeric Ithaca was the western part of Kefalonia Island, the Paliki peninsula, separated at that time from the main island by a channel. The aim of this study is to verify, based on geological and geomorphological field observations, the existence of the proposed “channel” during the Homeric era, and its filling by a series of landslides originating from the eastern mountains, and to determine the paleogeographic evolution of the study area in the late Holocene. Detailed geological and geomorphological mapping was performed focusing on different landforms of fluvial origin, slope changes, planation and depositional surfaces, karst features, mass wasting features, and faults. Topographic diagrams and maps, aerial photographs, and satellite images were used, accompanied by extensive fieldwork. For the geological mapping, field observations were combined with previous works. A spatial database derived from the aforementioned material and work was constructed using geographic information system (GIS) techniques. A digital terrain model (DTM) of the study region was also created. All the geological and geomorphological evidence refutes the hypothesis for the existence of a channel in NW Kefalonia. Moreover, there is a serious discordance in the time period needed for the formation and evolution of the landscape, considering the rock type and the Mediterranean climate of the area.

The Ionian zone is a classic thin-skinned linear fold and thrust belt forming a part of the external Hellenides, in westernmost Greece. The region has been a focus of intensive paleomagnetic investigation since the early 1980s, and it is now generally believed to have undergone a multiphase clockwise vertical-axis rotation of 40°–60° since the Miocene, although the timings are disputed, and spatial variations within this trend have been largely ignored thus far. We present data from thirty new paleomagnetic sites and a reappraisal of previous results from the Ionian zone in an attempt to construct a unified model for the tectonic evolution of the Ionian zone. We find that the clockwise rotations may be due, at least partially, to rotation during thrust sheet emplacement, with evidence of a forelandward decrease in rotation. However, superimposed on this pattern of thin-skinned rotations we observe post-Pliocene rotations that affect multiple thrust sheets in a consistent manner. These are interpreted to result from regional tectonics associated with, for example, the Kefallonia fault zone at the western termination of the Hellenic arc and from deformation in the transition zone between Anatolian westward extrusion and southern Aegean extension. Overall, the result is a pattern of thin-skinned, westward-decreasing clockwise rotations distorted by superimposed thick-skinned rotations resulting from the complex interplay of plate motions in the eastern Mediterranean.