WEDNESDAY, AUG. 28 at 8:00PM

Is King Odysseus, the Trojan Horse-building genius of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey, merely a fictional figure in classic literature? Or was he a real, flesh-andblood man who lived and  died in ancient Greece? That’s the central question explored in ODYSSEUS RETURNS, which follows the quest of amateur historian Makis Mataxas to convince the world that he’s discovered the tomb of Odysseus. Instead of being celebrated, his findings trigger a storm of controversy and an archaeological mystery that spans three decades.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus wanders the world for two decades before returning to his beloved homeland. For thousands of years, historians have believed the Greek hero’s home was the island of Ithaca, known today as Ithaki. Although archaeologists discovered the remains of Troy, Mycenae, and other cities of Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization in the 19th century, they have continued to search in vain for almost 200 years on Ithaca, where no ruins of an ancient city have ever been found.

So, in 1991, when Metaxas, mayor of a village on Ithaki’s neighboring island of Kefalonia, claims that clues in the Odyssey led him right to the door of a 3,000-year-old Mycenaean king’s tomb, archeologists are skeptical. But an excavation by Greece’s leading archeologist, Lazaros Kolonas, unearths a seal stone carved out of rock crystal, a type of jewelry used by Mycenaean  nobility to prove their identity and one of the most important artifacts of the Bronze Age. The design on the seal bears an uncanny resemblance to a design described by Homer on a prized possession of Odysseus.

The discovery led to 30 years of controversy and conflict as citizens of both Ithaki and Kefalonia claimed to be home of Odysseus' tomb. Now though, University of Kansas classics professor John Younger, the world’s foremost expert on Mycenaean and Minoan seal stones, comes to Kefalonia to study the seal found in the tomb. And, after more than two decades away, archeologist Lazaros Kolonas returns to the site, finally agreeing to go on the record about whether this tomb really belonged to Homer’s legendary king, Odysseus.

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