The Phaeacians — Scheria (the Phaeacians) (Σχερίη), landfall 14 of 15 on the voyage of odysseus

Nausicaa

Poseidon's last storm shatters the raft; two days and nights in the water; a desperate scramble at a river mouth. Odysseus crawls ashore on Scheria naked, salt-crusted, swollen — and buries himself in dead leaves under twin olive bushes like an ember banked in ash.

He is woken by girls' voices. The princess Nausicaa has come to wash linen at the river — sent by a dream Athena planted — and plays ball with her maids while it dries. When the terrifying wild man steps out holding a branch before him, every girl runs but one. Nausicaa stands her ground, hears his careful, flattering, desperate speech, gives him food and clothing, and tells him how to reach the palace: enter, pass my father, and clasp my mother's knees. His nostos is rebuilt from this moment of a girl's courage.

“There is nothing better or finer than when two people of one heart and mind keep house as man and wife.” — Odyssey VI, 182–184

The hall of Alcinous

The palace of Alcinous shines like sun and moon: bronze walls with a frieze of blue enamel, golden doors flanked by gold and silver dogs that Hephaestus made — undying watchdogs, art in place of guards. The Phaeacians are the best sailors in the world; their ships steer by thought and cross the sea in a night.

The nameless stranger is fed, honoured, offered the king's daughter half-seriously in marriage — and betrayed by his own weeping. Twice the blind bard Demodocus sings of Troy, and twice the guest pulls his cloak over his head and cries. At last Alcinous asks directly: who are you? The answer opens the greatest flashback in literature: 'I am Odysseus, son of Laertes' — and for the next four books he tells this entire map: Cicones, Lotus-eaters, Cyclops, Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, Circe, the dead, the Sirens, Scylla, the cattle, Calypso. Everything the journey mode has shown, Odysseus is telling in this hall.

“I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, known to all men for my wiles; my fame goes up to heaven.” — Odyssey IX, 19–20

The garden where nothing fails

Outside the courtyard lies the marvel Homer lingers over longest: four acres of orchard where the fruit never fails and never runs out, winter or summer — pear ripening on pear, apple on apple, grape cluster on grape cluster, fig on fig.

The west wind is always blowing there, some fruit always budding while other fruit ripens. It is the ancient world's picture of abundance without labour — as far from an Ithacan farm as the Phaeacians are from ordinary men.

Dear to the gods

The Phaeacians live at the edge of the human world, and the gods visit them undisguised, feasting beside them at the sacrifices. Alcinous says it plainly: we are their kin, as close as the Cyclopes and the wild tribes of Giants.

That is the strangeness of Scheria: the last stop of the mythic voyage is a place halfway back to the golden age — a decompression chamber between the world of monsters and the hard, real, political island waiting at the end of the next crossing.

The vintage that never ends

In the same garden, one plot of the vineyard bakes in the sun as raisins while men tread grapes in another and green clusters are only just shedding their blossom in a third — every stage of the vintage at once, forever.

Loaded with bronze, gold and woven cloth — gifts worth more, Homer notes, than Odysseus' whole share of the sack of Troy — he is laid on a Phaeacian ship at nightfall. He sleeps, deathlike and sweet, through the entire crossing: the man who could not sleep at Aeolia sleeps through his actual homecoming. The sailors set him, still sleeping, on the sand of Ithaca and pile the treasure under an olive tree.

The petrified ship: Corfu has claimed Scheria since antiquity. Poseidon, furious at the Phaeacians for ferrying his enemy home, turned their returning ship to stone within sight of harbour — and Corfiots still point to it: the little cypress-topped islet of Pontikonisi, ship-shaped and anchored forever off the coast.