What am I reading right now? Hard to believe it, but it is The Odyssey.[1] Even harder to believe, I am reading it from cover to cover for the very first time. I am enjoying tremendously every single page of it, and I am not skipping a single page. My beloved got it for me, and I started reading it at once even though I wanted to start with The Iliad.[2] It is in the mail as I write, and I hope it will reach me by the time I finish its sequel about the sack of Troy and its aftermath. Whence my intense if sudden interest? Of course, it has to do with the unexpected discovery that Motovun is a plausible site of Homer’s epic saga.[3] The very possibility that I am reading about the sack of the ancient city at its very site excites me no end. Would I ever read Homer from cover to cover under any other circumstances? Hard to tell, but chances are that I would skip the two books had I not stumbled upon Sinožić’s book a month or so ago. What amazes me most of all is that I find The Odyssey very much to my liking. Put together nearly three millennia ago, it is still a book that beats nearly everything ever written. And there is no better place to read it than the hilltown of my homecoming. Odysseus incarnate, I dare say. Ha!

Footnotes

1. Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Martin Hammond, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014 (first published in 2000).

2. Homer, The Iliad, translated by Martin Hammond, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.

3. Sinožić, Vedran, Naša Troja (Our Troy), Simbol: Novingrad, 2015 (in Croatian).