Travel writer Laura Coffey was so inspired by Homer’s 3,000-year-old poem that it sparked a fascination with ancient Greek myths and legends. She set off on her own epic adventure to discover the modern destinations behind The Odyssey, the real places where myths meet geography.
The sky was the brightest of winter blues above the yellow town of Mahón, in Menorca. All the buildings were painted shades of citrus and lemon, ochre and mustard and every hue in between. Palm trees rattled in the wind and the road swept down the hill towards the deep port where white yachts waited, in their superior, gleaming way, for summer.
Along the central shopping avenue orange trees were still bursting with fruit and sparrows gathered on their branches at dusk to scream the day’s news at each other. Their volume increasing as the light fell. Until at twilight the chatter crescendoed so loudly you had to raise your voice to be heard over it. After the bone cold of icy Croatia, where I had been for a month. It felt tropical here by comparison, the air warmer and softer. I had won an extra hour of light, the days stretched open in front of me again. There was sunshine optimism spinning through these yellow streets.
I sat high on the green terrace of Cafe Nou overlooking the orange trees with their sparrows. Eating a tostada con tomate and reading about Mauricio Obregón. He was a 20th-Century historian and university professor who spent a lot of his time retracing ancient voyages. He believed that the island of the Cyclops could be one of the Balearic Islands. So the land where one-eyed monsters used to roam might be here, on Menorca.
In the story,
Poseidon has an affair with a sea-nymph who immediately gets pregnant. no god ever has issues with sperm count. And their child grows up to become the strongest of all the Cyclopes. And lives a quiet life on an island as a shepherd.