Ionian Islands in Venetian hands since 1238. The islands thus became the only part of the Greek-speaking world to escape Ottoman rule, which gave them both a unity and an importance in Greek history they would otherwise not have had. Corfu was the only Greek island never conquered by the Turks. Under Venetian rule, many of the upper classes spoke Italian (or Venetian in some cases) and converted to Roman Catholicism, but the majority remained Greek ethnically, linguistically, and religiously. In the 18th century, a Greek national independence movement began to emerge, and the free status of the Ionian islands made them
Ithaca Ithaca Ithaca, Ithaki or Ithaka (; Greek: Ιθάκη, "Ithakē" ) is a Greek island located in the Ionian Sea, off the northeast coast of Kefalonia and to the west of continental Greece. Ithaca's main island has an area of and had a population in 2011 of 3,231. It is the second-smallest of seven main Ionian Islands, after Paxi. Ithaca is a separate regional unit of the Ionian Islands region, and the only municipality of the regional unit. The capital is Vathy (or Vathi). Modern Ithaki is historically linked with Homer's Ithaca, the home of Odysseus, whose twenty-year absence is part