Nolan's The Odyssey is sending tourists to Homer's real places in Greece

Ithaca, Greece Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey is drawing tourists to places in Greece named in Homer's epic, according to two University of Cincinnati (UC) classicists. Professor Jack Davis and senior research associate Sharon Stocker spoke to the Greek news outlet Ekathimerini about the trend. The university reported their comments in August 2026.

Tour operators are selling packages that include visits to real places mentioned in the poem. Homer's Odyssey tells of the hero Odysseus and his long trip home after the Trojan War, a voyage full of mythology. UC says the film has so far made $1.1 billion at the box office.

Stocker told Ekathimerini that the film is introducing wide audiences to the area's history and literature.

The epics, and especially ‘The Odyssey,’ are an excellent starting point for learning about Mycenaean culture. We hope that the film will draw attention to the numerous places mentioned by Homer, but also to the Mycenaean era in general.

Sharon Stocker, senior research associate in Classics, University of Cincinnati

A real palace behind an off-screen scene

Davis recommends the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, in the south-western Peloponnese. The film refers to it when Odysseus' son Telemachus visits the palace off camera. He goes there to try to learn what happened to his father after the war.

This is a real Bronze Age palace, the best preserved of the entire Mycenaean civilization. Together with the Ministry of Culture, we have significantly improved the infrastructure for visitors.

Jack Davis, professor of Classics, University of Cincinnati

The site has a long tie to Cincinnati. UC classics professor Carl Blegen excavated the palace before and after the Second World War. His finds included clay tablets that were instrumental in deciphering Linear B, the script Mycenaean scribes used to write an early form of Greek. Blegen also led excavations at Troy in the 1930s, and UC holds a large collection of photographs and records from that project.

In 2015 Davis and Stocker found a Bronze Age tomb of a Mycenaean warrior in the same area. They called him the Griffin Warrior, after an ivory plaque engraved with a griffin. The griffin is a mythical beast, part eagle and part lion. That tomb and two others the UC team found in 2017 are helping historians understand Bronze Age society, culture and economics about 3,500 years ago.

Ithaca and the Cyclops cave

The pair also recommend the excavations on Ithaca led by Professor Emeritus Yannos Lolos of the University of Ioannina. Ithaca is the island Homer names as Odysseus' home. Another suggested stop is the cave of Nestor, which Nolan's film suggests was where the Cyclops lived. Davis said UC researchers had carried out archaeological work in the cave and found prehistoric remains there.

The places on these tours are real, but the hero's footsteps are fictional, as the university puts it. The Homeric epics took shape centuries after the Mycenaean palaces fell. The direct evidence for the Bronze Age world the poem looks back to comes from sites such as Pylos: the palace itself, its Linear B tablets and the warrior tombs.

Visitors to Pylos will soon have more to see. Davis said the Archaeological Museum of Chora is expected to reopen later this year after renovations. It holds many of the finds from the Griffin Warrior's tomb.

Sources

• Riding the wave of the Odyssey effect (University of Cincinnati)

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