I've seen tiny Ithaca, one of the seven Ionian Islands, every which way and in all weathers.  I strongly argue the case for visiting places out of season, and finding what it is that really sustains them.  Every time I've been there, I have found it equally compelling, and thought I first met my friends Spero and Mal Raftopulos in summer, I have returned to stay with them in the winter and in autumn. 

Ithaca, the seat of the Homeric legend of The Odyssey, is steeped in its tradition of exile and return, separation and nostalgia.  The yearning for Ithaca is not the exclusive province of its own people though.  I brought it home with me after my first visit, and I kept going back. 

Spero Raftopulos returned with his Australian wife Mal to the island of his forefathers.  They bought a piece of land on the top of the hill where Ulysses' lost city is supposed to be buried at Pilicata, where three hills meet and three seas can be seen.  Together they built a home there. 

With two small babies they camped under an olive tree for a year and laid the foundations of their future home, now a stunning manifestation of Spero's vision and his and Mal's extraordinary talent as builders.  Kate and Naki played in mud and sat in buckets of water to wash it off, and kept cool in the hot weeks of summer.  

The thousands of Ithacans in Australia or America dream of the time they will return "to leave their bones on Ithaca", as the locals say.  Thus many wizened old chaps speak fluent English and can tell you endless tales of how life used to be here, when they had no shoes and lost their toenails kicking a football made of rags before walking 10 kilometers home from school.  When this happened, they'd apply a tetanus vaccine of dried donkey dung to the open wound and bind it with a bandage made from a strip of their shirt. 

Spero's ancestor, Levendi, a nickname meaning "a handsome man who excelled and stood out from others", was one of the first whose need to support his young wife took him in 1895 to Australia.  Levendi - real name Efstathios Raftopulos -  was a merchant adventurer who had regularly sailed his small boat to the Greek mainland towns of Zaverda and Preveza to trade wheat and olive oil for fresh produce and contraband tobacco.  His expert seamanship and courage had given him his nickname. Everyone in Ithaca has one - mine, now, is "The Correspondent", on account of my endless letters to Mal and Spero.

Levendi and his descendants continued to come and go from Ithaca.  Spero's own father, Nakissos, left at the age of 14, and didn't see Ithaca again for 40 years.  When he arrived back at the main port of Vathi, he knelt and kissed the ground. 

In 1953, Levendi's family home at Aphales Bay was, in common with 80 percent of the buildings on the island, razed to the ground in the earthquake which was to change a timeless way of life forever.  In the aftermath thousands of people left, unable to face the task of rebuilding theirs lives, though many did through sheer guts.