Possible Baltic Origins of Troy?

by Miltiades Varvounis

The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales is an essay written by Felice Vinci, an Italian nuclear engineer, published for the first time in the mid-90s. The book, which has been translated into German, Danish, Estonian and French, sets out a new perspective about the geographical setting of Homer’s masterpieces the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Vinci’s book, which has been promoted by a famous Italian Homeric scholar, Rosa Calzecchi Onesti, questions whether the events in the Iliad and the Odyssey took place in Greece and Asia Minor. The author has received much criticism for his controversial theory. Some scholars dismissed Vinci’s work as pseudo-archaeology, but two decades after its initial publication, Vinci’s “Baltic theory” is slowly gaining some attention in the academic world. Felice Vinci has considered climate and geography to analyze where the events described in Homer’s epics may actually have occurred. Vinci has read hundreds of sources, calculated sailing distances, and looked at climate details. Vinci concludes that the events recounted by Homer did not take place in the Mediterranean area as tradition asserts, but rather in the region of Northeastern Europe, in and around the Baltic Sea.

According to Vinci’s theories, the blond seafarers – the Achaeans – who founded the Mycenaean civilization in the 16th century BC brought these tales from the Baltic world to Greece after the decline of the so called post-glacial climatic optimum. Then they rebuilt their original world, where the Trojan War and many other mythological events had taken place, in the Mediterranean; through many generations the memory of the heroic age and the feats performed by their ancestors in their lost homeland was preserved and handed down in written form around the 8th Century BC, when alphabetical writing was introduced in Greece.

For centuries, Homeric geography has given rise to questions and uncertainty. The correspondence of towns, mainland areas and islands, which the poet often describes with a wealth of detail, to traditional Mediterranean places is usually partial or even nonexistent. For example, the real location of Ithaca has always been a problematic issue for historians, which, according to very precise indications found in the Odyssey, is the westernmost part of a Homeric archipelago which includes three main islands, Dulichium (also called Dolicha), Same and Zacynthus. This does not correspond to the geographic reality of the Greek Ithaca in the Ionian Sea, located north of Zacynthus, east of Cephallonia and south of Lefkada.

Furthermore, Telemachus’ voyage from Ithaca to Pylos is too short. His swift journey by chariot from Pylos to Lacedaemon along a wheat-producing plain is too easy. Moreover, as classical scholar Moses Finley claims in his masterpiece The World of Odysseus, even the topographical detail of Ulysses’ home island of Ithaca is problematic, with several essential details that might correspond to the neighboring island of Lefkada, but would be quite impossible for Ithaca. Homer’s Ithaca is not described as being mountainous, while the Ionian Ithaca is actually very mountainous.

Troy might correspond to Toija, currently located in southern Finland, between Turku and Helsinki. According to Vinci, ancient Troy used to rise on the top of a hill, surrounded by two rivers – Simoeis and Scamander – which join in the plain below, today flooded, a few kilometers from the sea. This hypothesis would be confirmed by the finding of Bronze Age ruins in the area. This area also reveals significant other traces of the Bronze Age: near Toija there are many Bronze Age tumuli (a tumulus is a mound of earth and stones raised over one or more graves), like the ones described in the Iliad. The old copper mines of Orijärvi, located 10 km east of Toija, could conceivably be related to the origin of King Priam’s wealth, often mentioned by Homer.

Troy, according to Homer, lay northeast of the sea. This is one reason to dispute Troy’s location in Turkey, southwest of Dardanelles strait. Homer’s Hellespont, which was described in the epics to be “wide,” does not correspond to the long and narrow Dardanelles strait, but would with the Gulf of Finland. Vinci quotes the Danish chronicles written by the medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus, which note that the Roman name of Finland was Aeningia (alternatively Finingia), which might conceivably mean “Aeneas’ land.” In the area of southern Finland, west of Helsinki, we find a number of place-names which astonishingly resemble those mentioned in the Iliad and, in particular, the names of the allies of the Trojans: Askainen (Ascanius), Reso (Rhesus), Lyökki (Lycia), Tenala (Tenedos), Kiila (Cilla), Kiikoinen (Ciconians), etc.

Agamemnon’s voyage from Troy to Mycenae, rounding Cape Maleas, seems geographically absurd. The allies of the Trojans, such the Lycians and the Cilicians, whom Hector considers his neighbors, instead lived in Southern Asia Minor (Turkey) – far away from the Dardanelles. The spacious land of Crete, which Homer never identifies as an island, might, according to Vinci, refer to land along the Polish coast of the Baltic. According to Vinci, Crete in the Homeric epics may have nothing to do with the Mediterranean island, even though Crete plays a very significant role in Greek mythology.

Vinci’s claims touch also the Baltic Republics. For him Hellas (Greece) lay on the coast of present-day Estonia, next to the Homeric Hellespont (i.e. the “Sea of Hellenes / Greeks”), today’s Gulf of Finland. Phthia, Achilles’s homeland, lay on the fertile hills of southeastern Estonia, along the border with Latvia and Russia, stretching as far as the lake of Pskov. Famous warriors that Homer refers to as Myrmidons lived there, ruled by Achilles and Protesilaus (the first Achaean captain who fell in the Trojan War).

The Lithuanian language has very archaic features and a notable affinity with the ancient Indo-European language. Latvian historian Dr. Ilze Rūmniece suggested some suggestive parallels between ancient Curetes and the Western Baltic tribe of Curonians (Lithuanian: Kuršiai). Curonians lived in what are now the western parts of Latvia and Lithuania from the 4th to the 16th centuries, when they merged with other Baltic tribes. They gave their name to the region of Courland, and they spoke the Curonian language. They were known as fierce warriors, excellent sailors and pirates, who were involved in several wars and alliances with Vikings in early Medieval times. During that period they were the most restless and the richest of all the Balts. Interestingly, chronicler Saxo Grammaticus mentions in his Danish Chronicles the inhabitants of Courland as “Curetes” (Gesta Danorum I, VI: 7), comparable to Homer’s Curetes.

In other words, Homeric geography, if compared to the actual physical layout of the Greek world, reveals several glaring anomalies which are hard to explain.

Other evidence

There is other evidence that the Mycenaean civilization might had come from the Baltic world. The distinguished Swedish scholar, Prof. Martin P. Nilsson, reports archaeological evidence, uncovered in Mycenaean sites in Greece, suggesting their Baltic origin. One example is the existence of a large quantity of Baltic amber in ancient Mycenaean graves in Greece, which is difficult to ascribe to trade because amber is very scarce in coeval Minoan tombs in Crete as well as in later graves on the continent. Another example is the striking similarity of two stone slabs found in a tomb in Dendra of Greece to menhirs (a menhir is a large upright stone) dating to the Bronze Age in East-Central Europe. Skulls found in the Necropolis of Kalkani have Northern European characteristics.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell, when writing about the Mycenaeans in the 1st chapter of his famous History of Western Philosophy wrote: “There are traces which most probably confirm that they were Greek-speaking conquerors and that at least the aristocracy was made up of blond Nordic invaders who brought the Greek language with them.” The archaeologist Geoffrey Bibby underlines the common origin of the Achaean princes of Greece and Asia Minor in the 15th century BC and the sun-worshipping farmers of the Baltic Bronze Age world.

Homer’s world does present some northeastern Baltic features. In both of Homer’s epic poems, the climate is typically described as being cold and unsettled – very different from what we expect in a traditional Mediterranean setting. The Iliad dwells upon violent storms, torrential rain and disastrous floods, and often mentions snow, cold, ice, wind and fog in Troy, mainland Greece, Ithaca and the Cyclopes’ land. As regards the sun, the Iliad hardly ever refers to its heat. Also the Odyssey never mentions the sun’s warmth in Ithaca – though it refers to the sailing season.

Homer mentions other phenomena which are typical of high latitudes. For example, clothes described in the two poems are consistent with a northern climate and findings from the Baltic Bronze Age. In the episode of the Odyssey in which Telemachus and Peisistratus are guests at Menelaus’s house in Sparta, the two young men get ready for lunch after a bath: “They wore thick cloaks and tunics” (Od. IV: 50–51). The same is said of Odysseus when he is a guest at Alcinous’s house (Od. VIII: 455-457). Similarly, when Achilles leaves for Troy, his mother thoughtfully prepares him a trunk “filled with tunics, wind-proof thick cloaks and blankets” (Il. XVI: 223-224), while Nestor’s cloak is “double and large; a thick fur stuck out” (Il. X: 134).

As for the poor, Eumaeus the herdsman pours red wine for his guests “into a wooden cup” (Od. XVI: 52), like the cup Odysseus gives Polyphemus (Od. IX: 346). Wood, of course, is the cheapest material in northeastern Europe (Lithuania and Latvia have an ancient tradition of wooden beer tankards). Regarding food, it’s remarkable that Mediterranean fruit, vegetables, olive oil, or olives never appear on the table of Homer’s Greek and Trojan heroes. Their diet was based on meat (beef, pork, and goat), much like that of the Balts, who ate meat in large quantities.

British archaeologist Stuart Piggott once commented: “The nobility of the [Homeric] hexameters should not deceive us into thinking that the Iliad and the Odyssey are other than the poems of a largely barbarian Bronze Age or Early Iron Age Europe. There is no Minoan or Asiatic blood in the veins of the Grecian Muses (…) They dwell remote from the Cretan-Mycenaean world and in touch with the European elements of Greek speech and culture (…) Behind Mycenaean Greece (…) lies Europe.”

Conclusions

Some might conclude that Homer’s world appears to be more archaic than the Mycenaean one. If the validity of Vinci’s theory will be confirmed through further research, new and fascinating horizons will open up regarding the origin and prehistory of European civilization. It would be backdated a thousand years – shedding light on the peoples of the Baltic Bronze Age and illuminating their life, culture, traditions, religion, and history that has been almost entirely unknown until now.

The possible “rediscovery” of Homer would cause us to reconsider the origins of our own civilization, and even contribute to the birth of a new humanism in our Western culture. Little by little the Baltic countries have started to get interested in this fascinating theory. A few years ago, the academic world has finally opened its doors to Felice Vinci, who has been invited to hold conferences in Estonia, Finland and Greece. His new findings could open new developments related to Baltic prehistory and the dawn of the ancient Greek civilization.