NOT the view from the “Calypso Cave” that tourists visit in Gozo.
Malta is, compared to Sicily, a small island in the Mediterranean Sea. And everyone on Malta considers nearby Gozo a really small island. So I didn’t think that it would be too difficult to find the sea goddess Calypso who, in a dramatic and emotional episode in Homer’s “Odyssey,” kept Odysseus in her clutches (and her cave) for seven years.
Or, if I didn’t actually find her during my MedTrek around Gozo, I was sure that I would run into someone who had slept with her or, at the very least, a number of women that had been named after her.
In fact, I thought I met a contemporary Calypso the second I got off the Gozo Channel Line ferry. Rita Meilak, the goddess-like concierge at the Grand Hotel overlooking the harbor, immediately upgraded my online-booked room to a suite with a terrace. No wonder Odysseus, who was offered immortality as well as free room and board, stayed here seven years!
But Rita, who was born in Gozo and worked in New York in the 80s, denies she’s Calypso.
“The real Calypso was beautiful and thin, always wore a flowing white gown, had seductively long hair and had a permanent halo around her head,” Rita told me as I headed out on my 61-kilometer walkabout on the island. “But nobody here makes a big deal about her today.”
To my chagrin, Rita claims that today there’s no one in Gozo, which is one-ninth the size of Malta, named Calypso — or Odysseus for that matter. There’s a Calypso Hotel, Calypso Antiques, a Calypso Street, a Calypso Diving School and a few houses named Calypso. But not one person with that name.
“I haven’t even heard of a pet called Calypso,” Rita said.
I don’t know why. I love the name and have a friend in Monaco, TV and radio commentator Richard Barnes, who named his daughter Calypso.
“The story of Calypso was the first real love story ever written,” said Barnes, who started his career in Sydney. “Calypso as a name evokes romantic, enigmatic and interesting thoughts.”
Apparently everywhere but on Gozo, where I thought before I arrived that there’d be dozens of chicas named Calypso and that I could at least buy one of them a cup of nectar.
To ensure that I wasn’t being misled, that Zeus was not simply keeping Calypso away from me, I went to the Mnarja Band Club, a social group where members seem to hold more cards than instruments, on Sunday morning. None of the 26 men at the club bar admitted to ever having met a woman named Calypso. More importantly, there seemed to be a consensus that the publicized site of “Calypso Cave” above the sandy Ramla Bay is a hoax and not the actual Calypso cave.
Not the real thing, according to some Gozitans.
Don’t waste your time looking for Calypso or someone named after her, it was suggested to me by some older members of the Mnarja Band Club. Instead, they recommended, go sit in the real cave for a while and use your imagination to envision Calypso and Odysseus living together on our mythical and magical island. That will make your visit much more enlightening, they added, as they gave me directions to a hillside hole above Ramla Bay.
Calypso liked a Spartan décor and frequently let Odysseus use the back door.
I walked a few kilometers, climbed a hill and spent an hour in Calypso’s real cave soaking up the view, digesting the atmosphere, admiring the lack of décor, trying out the nifty backdoor entrance and attempting to make psychic contact. Then, armed with a box of Maltesers in my backpack and my imagination on high beam, I continued my walking adventure and immediately begin to sense the duo’s presence everywhere on this island with 28,000 inhabitants – and lots of duped tourists perhaps visiting the wrong cave.
It was a rocky, windy, wavy, cliffy, sunny gods-kissed weekend walkabout. And once I got started I swear that I saw Calypso and Odysseus almost everywhere as I MedTrekked on the cliffside paths, through terraced fields, into little towns with names like Xlendi and Nadur, and along the stony seaside. Here are just a few of the many places that my mind’s eye espied them during my soft walking adventure:
Calypso and Odysseus swam by the Mgarr ix-Xini 17th century coastal tower.
Odysseus whispered to me at one extraordinarily windy point of my MedTrek that he was very impressed with the cliffs, hills, natural harbors, wind, waves and other natural elements. He said they reminded him of his kingdom in Ithaca and that, though he yearned to get home to his wife Penelope, he had been inordinately attracted to Calypso, a nymph that he called “immortal and most beautiful.”
On a scale of 1-10, well-traveled Odysseus gave the Gozo cliffs a 12.
I like to think that, despite Odysseus’s occasional homesick tears and frequent moaning about being trapped on Gozo, he and Calypso had some good times together here until the gods broke them apart (in a separation that led to the expression “seven-year ditch”) and sent him on his way home.
He certainly had a number of things to keep him busy. Maybe, like islanders today, he gathered wild-growing fennel, peas, figs, capers and salt as he walked Gozo, which back in his day was called Ogygia. He must have wandered to every extreme of the island, from what’s now the harbor at Mgarr to the site of the looming lighthouse near Saint Dimitri, and almost certainly dropped into the prehistoric Ggantija Temples. Though, between you and me, he probably wouldn’t be too impressed with downtown Victoria, the biggest city that locals call Rabat, unless he wanted a Big Mac.
Odysseus got his salt from these “pans” found on the seaside.
Did Calypso and Odysseus walk on the rock formation called Azure Window?
I frequently wondered why, despite Calypso’s powerful lures and allures, Odysseus didn’t find a way to get off the island during those seven years. Homer doesn’t even intimate that he attempted a serious escape. Why not? After all, this is the guy who came up with the ploy of the Trojan Horse, tricked the Cyclops and went on to defeat over one hundred suitors making a play for his wife.
Why didn’t Odysseus just catch a late afternoon ferry?
I may not have found the actual Calypso, met someone who slept with her, discovered a Calypso cult or even found someone on Gozo with the same name. But my visit to what some members of the Mnarja Band Club consider Calypso’s real cave, and some intriguing visions during my MedTrek, made this sidetrek a worthwhile break from my ongoing circumnavigation of Sicily.
If any MedTrekkers want to Follow the Idiot on Gozo, here’s a photograph of the cave’s exterior and coordinates of the exact location. And, for the record, I did hear from the guy selling ice cream at Ramla Beach that when he was a kid his father had a dog called Calypso.
This is the place some Gozitans consider Calypso’s real cave.
And here’s how to find it:
Latitude: 36.06212
Longitude: 14.28688
Additional anecdotes, details and gossip about Gozo, Calypso and Odysseus will be found in my sequel to “The Idiot and the Odyssey: Walking the Mediterranean.”
Text and Photos by Joel Stratte-McClure
More on Richard Barnes @ http://www.facebook.com/l/3f04a;barnesvoice.com
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