About & Credits

Odyssey Explorer is an interactive atlas of Odysseus's ten-year journey home: seventeen landfalls from Troy to Ithaca, each carrying the ancient Greek text, a public-domain translation, word-level glosses, etymologies, sourced notes, and art. Toggle NOW to see where the myth touches the modern Mediterranean.

Honesty about geography

Nobody knows where most of these places "really" are — ancient geographers already argued about it (Eratosthenes joked you would trace the route when you found the cobbler who sewed the bag of the winds; Strabo, Geography 1.2.15, disagreed). Every stop is tagged: secure (a real, identified place), traditional (the classical identification), disputed (serious rival candidates), or mythic (no location claimed; coordinates exist only to keep the voyage line unbroken).

Texts

• Ancient Greek: Odyssey, ed. A.T. Murray (1919), via the Perseus Digital Library (canonical-greekLit), licence CC BY-SA 4.0.
• English translation: A.T. Murray (1919), public domain.
• Crew arithmetic follows Homer's own numbers (companions, excluding Odysseus).

Maps & imagery

• Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), served as vector tiles by OpenFreeMap / OpenMapTiles.
• Satellite view: Sentinel-2 cloudless 2025 by EOX IT Services GmbH, licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2025.
• Polytonic Greek map labels rendered with Noto Sans glyphs via OpenFreeMap.

Art

• The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy — Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, c. 1760 · National Gallery, London · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (Troy)
• Tetradrachm of Maroneia — head of Dionysus, ivy-wreathed — Photograph: ArchaiOptix (Wikimedia Commons), c. 146–1 BC (photo 2016) · Staatliche Münzsammlung, Munich · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons (Ismarus of the Cicones)
• The Storm at Cape Aya — Ivan Aivazovsky, 1899 · State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (The Storm at Cape Malea)
• Land of the Lotus Eaters — Robert S. Duncanson, 1861 · Collection of the Swedish Royal Family · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (The Lotus-Eaters)
• Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus — J.M.W. Turner, 1829 · The National Gallery, London · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (The Cyclops)
• Odysseus Receives from Aeolus the Bag of the Winds (Les Travaux d'Ulysse, pl. 13) — Theodoor van Thulden, after Francesco Primaticcio, 1632–1633 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons (Aeolus and the Bag of Winds)
• The Laestrygonians Attack the Ships of Odysseus (Odyssey Landscapes) — Unknown Roman painter, after a Hellenistic model, ca. 60–40 BC · Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (fresco from a house on Via Graziosa, Esquiline, Rome) · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (The Laestrygonians)
• Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses — John William Waterhouse, 1891 · Gallery Oldham · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (Circe of Aeaea)
• Tiresias appears to Ulysses during the sacrifice — Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli), 1780–1785 · Albertina, Vienna · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (The Underworld)
• Odysseus Cremates the Body of Elpenor (Les Travaux d'Ulysse, pl. 25) — Theodoor van Thulden, after Francesco Primaticcio and Nicolò dell'Abate, 1632–1633 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons (Return to Aeaea)
• Ulysses and the Sirens — John William Waterhouse, 1891 · National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (The Sirens)
• Odysseus in front of Scylla and Charybdis — Henry Fuseli, 1794–1796 · Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (Scylla & Charybdis)
• The Companions of Odysseus Rob the Cattle of Helios — Pellegrino Tibaldi, 1554–1556 · Palazzo Poggi, Bologna · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (Thrinacia — the Cattle of the Sun)
• The Ninth Wave — Ivan Aivazovsky, 1850 · State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (The Wreck)
• Odysseus und Kalypso — Arnold Böcklin, 1882 · Kunstmuseum Basel · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (Ogygia — Calypso)
• Odysseus and Nausicaa — Pieter Lastman, 1619 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (Scheria of the Phaeacians)
• Ulysses and Penelope — Francesco Primaticcio, c. 1545 · Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (Ithaca)

Built with

SvelteKit (static), MapLibre GL JS, and the conviction that the Greek is the attraction, not the barrier. No backend, no tracking, no accounts.