Making the Case for a Baltic Odyssey by Tim Bird

I visited Troy on a cool and showery afternoon in August. I found it by a sultry inlet, its ancient walls buried beneath a creeping forest, its once teeming streets long turned to pasture, the view to the sea extended beyond the horizon by the centuries of geological uplift. There was nothing to suggest its ancient tragedies and glories, nothing to distinguish its pleasant brooks and meadows, its lanes and ditches, from those that defined the landscape for many miles in every direction.

As my wife drove the car across a narrow bridge and passed a crumbling wooden barn, I squinted against a sudden spear of sunlight. Did this track lead past the harbour from which Priam launched his armies? Did they drag the Wooden Horse this way, the curses emanating from its treacherous belly? Did Agamemnon glance across these fields and woods, anticipating conflict, then cowering beneath the clouds of arrows that exploded from this sky, and did Achilles weep here for the death of Patroclus? Was it from these small lakes, now all but cut off from the sea to the South, that Odysseus set sail on his intended return from the Trojan wars?

In any event, the journey to Troy took just two hours from our Helsinki home. The site is hard to find on any but the largest scale maps. Troy, or Toija as they call it now, is no more than a tiny village, an annex to the larger municipality of Kisko, a hundred or so kilometres to the West of the Finnish capital.

According, that is, to an Italian nuclear engineer by the name of Felipe Vinci. Homer’s stories, says, Vinci, were set in the Baltic, not the Mediterranean. His book, Omero nel Baltico, is a detailed explanation of this theory, and has attracted amused coverage in the media of northern Europe and the measured consideration of students of Homer at both ends of the continent. Although most academics remain unconvinced, Vinci’s persistence and attention to Homeric detail are at least endearing. He is a man with an all-consuming mission: Homer in the Baltic is his Achilles’ heel.

His mother and sister, both graduates in classical literature and archaeology, nurtured Vinci’s interest in Homer. ‘I have been interested in Homer and Greek mythology since I was seven years old,’ he says. ‘My elementary school teacher gave me a book about the Trojan wars, so the leading characters of the Iliad were as important for me as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.’

At university he took up nuclear engineering, and when his career in this field was interrupted by the Chernobyl power station accident in 1987 - he returned to the industry in 1992 - he found time to dedicate to his passion. ‘My theory is a child of Chernobyl,’ he wrote to me. ‘Between 1987 and1992, I had noted that all scholars, since ancient times, have found strange discrepancies between the Homeric geography and the Mediterranean sites; moreover, the climate in both the Homeric poems (The Iliad and The Odyssey) always appears cold, misty, windy and stormy. So when in 1992 I read Plutarch, who places the island of Ogygia (where Odysseus is detained by the goddess Calypso) in the North Atlantic, I found it natural to start from there, following the route indicated by the Odyssey towards the East in search of the Phaeacians’ land and Ithaca’s archipelago. I found an archipelago in Denmark which perfectly fits the Homeric descriptions - and I decided to go deeper into the matter.’

Vinci’s book nudges the reader along a well-argued if controversial route to the conclusion that the northern Baltic fits all the required Homeric criteria, much better so than the Mediterranean setting of conventional wisdom, from the idea that the Achaean tongue ‘was spoken along the Baltic coasts thousands of years ago’ to the observation of ‘a large quantity of namesakes right in the area between Helsinki and Turku which remind us of names and places around Troy’. Thus, Karja and Lökki are references to Caria and Lycia. Aijala becomes Aegialus, ‘where the Achaeans landed and made their camp’. Apollo’s sanctuary, Cilla, or Killa in Greek, is the coastal village of Kiila. The lake called Suomus, says Vinci, is reminiscent of the River Simois. And finally, most conclusively for Vinci, ‘it does so happen that there is a small Finnish village... not far from Tenala and Kiila, which has almost kept its ancient name in tact: Toija! It is actually situated just as Homer indicated, i.e. in a hilly area where two rivers meet. Furthermore, it is not very far from the sea with high ground behind it.’

In Toija I visited Jukka Kuussaari, a vet, and his wife Soili, the chairperson of the Kisko-Seura - the Kisko Society. Naturally, Vinci had been here too, and he describes his own first visit to the area with wide-eyed glee. ‘The scenery (of the Kiskonjoki river valley) which lay before us is exactly like that which Homer described in his poem,’ he gushes. ‘We could see the River Scamander, Simois and the plain on which the Achaeans and Trojans bitterly fought almost four thousand years ago!’

The Kuussaaris - a cultured and amiable family, well-dressed and casual, no outward signs of Homeric eccentricism - who welcomed me into their spacious home perched above a woodland stream on the edge of the village, had also seized upon Vinci’s theories, delighting in the opportunity it gave them to add some colour to the promotion of their small community.

‘Vinci was here when our converted granary art exhibition centre was opened,’ said Jukka, ‘and our local society managed to get financial help to renovate the granary partly as a result of the promotion gained by the theory.’

‘I had become the chairperson of the Kisko society in 1993,’ his wife Soili explained, ‘and I heard about Vinci’s theories in an article in (the Helsinki daily newspaper) Helsingin Sanomat. It was just one of many stories about his theories published in a lot of newspapers and magazines. I was introduced to the journalist who wrote the article, and then to Vinci himself. I thought it was an amusing theory.’

‘It was mostly just for fun at first,’ Jukka said. ‘But we have come to realize that Vinci has given so many good reasons for his arguments, for the theory that the wars of Troy - if they ever happened at all - might have happened in this area. The circumstances of the Baltic world fit the story much more accurately than the Mediterranean. Even if we are not complete believers, we think it’s a nice story.

‘Most of the local population think it’s a nice story, but they probably don’t really believe it. In fact, there was outright opposition to the idea at first, and the feeling that the reputation of the village would be damaged by it, that everybody would laugh at us. Now we believe there are more advantages than disadvantages. One of the biggest benefits has been from the art that has been inspired for the special exhibitions at the granary. Our Ulysses in the North exhibitions, for instance. It’s created a lot of new art.’

He walked to a shelf and removed a bronze sculpture, a female figurine wrapped in a billowing cloak of metal. ‘This is from the first exhibition, by a local sculptor,’ he said. ‘It’s a statue of Cassandra (the prophetess whose predictions were repeatedly ignored). This is just one example of what the theory has inspired locally.’

‘We’re grateful to Vinci,’ said Soili. ‘He’s visited four or five times. He has been here for our annual Helen of Troy (‘Toijan Helena’) competition.’ She registered my grin. ‘This is not a beauty contest. The local people vote for a Helen, and she serves as a PR representative for the community.’

They poured me coffee, and the battles of Troy seemed far away in the midst of such mundane domesticity. I looked out of the wide window, down to the stream at the end of the garden. It was barely wide enough to bear a canoe, let alone a Trojan warship. But it carried my own stream of thought back to Vinci’s account of one of his pilgrimages to Toija. ‘We felt we had to stop on the banks of the Scamander,’ he had written. ‘It was extremely exciting to imagine that on this awe inspiring June evening we could be standing right in the place where the high latitudes’ white nights poured forth their dimly-lit dusk four thousand years ago.’ I recalled that the lake marked on the map was not far from here, and there was a fort outlined on its eastern bank. It was the Haapaniemi fort, Jukka told me, one of the relics of a community which dated back 650 years. Kisko’s records dated it as one of the oldest municipalities in Finland.

‘Bronze Age remains have been excavated here,’ said Jukka. ‘You’ll find them in the National Museum in Helsinki. Iron Age remains as well. Vinci excavated while he was here. But our Finnish archaeologists are not excited by his theory, so he can not get the support for more excavations.’ Vinci, I had read, refers to the supposed evidence of a set of bronze swords, also stored in the National Museum, excavated at Salo near Kisko.

‘Sometimes we have little games,’ mused Jukka. ‘Perhaps on this hill or in that field, such and such a battle took place. And after all, there has been habitation on the site of this house for centuries, although we don’t know exactly how long.’

The sun was shining outside and as Jukka bundled his huge panting dog into his car ready to depart for a duck hunt, some figures emerged from the woods across the field. Lurking Trojan warriors, perhaps, preparing for attack? No. My wife and the children returning with a bag full of fresh chanterelles plucked from the forest floor.