LONDON – The long-lost city of Ithaca, home of the legendary hero Odysseus in the Iliad and Odyssey, is on the island of Cephalonia off the western shore of Greece, three British researchers announced yesterday.

The original contours of Ithaca have been distorted over the millenniums by a series of earthquakes that raised land levels, converting it into a peninsula of Cephalonia called Paliki.

The researchers said the topographical changes hid the identity of Ithaca from generations of historians and archeologists tracing the epic journey of Odysseus around 1200 before the common era.

The team, led by Robert Bittlestone, chairman of the management consultancy Metaprxis, has identified the geographical locations of 26 specific Ithaca locations mentioned by Homer, they said.

“The Odyssey fits Paliki like a glove,” Bittlestone said here at a news conference for “Odysseus Unbound,” a new book describing the discovery.

His co-authors are historian James Diggle of the University of Cambridge and geologist John Underhill of Edinburgh University.

The next step is to dig for traces of Odysseus’s castle and city as soon as the group can secure sufficient funding.

The search for the location of Ithaca has been in progress at least since the time of the first century Greek historian Strabo, who placed it east of Cephalonia, on the modern day island of Ithaca.

But each tentative assignment of a real location to the story has required bending the geography of the Odyssey to fit the location.

Some critics have said that Homer didn’t get it right because he lived in Turkey and never visited Ithaca. Others said the story was simply fictional.