A Greek Odyssey with Bettany Hughes

The historian and classicist goes Greek island-hopping to explore their history from the time of the Ancients to the present day. In Santorini, she visits a Minoan city preserved in time by one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in history. Bettany's next port of call is Naxos, where in an abandoned marble quarry, she finds a genuinely monumental statue of the god that has lain there for thousands of years, before heading to a taverna to take part in some local festivities. The presenter later arrives in Sifnos, where long-distance communications were mastered millennia before telegrams or telephones.

Arriving in Crete just as a storm hits, the historian is lucky to reach "the big island" before the seas become impassable, and the annual Christian Epiphany festivities are hampered. Bettany Hughes travels to the ruins of the ancient city of Knossos, synonymous with English archaeologist Arthur Evans who unearthed much of its palace over 100 years ago, beneath which the legendary King Minos is said to have kept a crazed half-man, half-bull - the Minotaur. Bettany meets Professor Stampolidis, whose ground-breaking archaeological discoveries prove links between ancient legend and historical reality. 

Crete is the home of legendary heroes and villains, powerful ancient civilizations, and macabre history. Follow Bettany to Chania, Knossos, and Eleutherna, where she explores a replica boat built from the age of Odysseus and recounts the stories of the Minotaur and Achilles. Then discover a more recent, dramatic chapter in Crete's history as we investigate Germany's occupation of the island in World War II and meet a 95-year-old who narrowly escaped a Nazi firing squad as a teenager.

The historian arrives in the Peloponnese, a peninsula regarded as home to some of ancient Greece's most legendary kings and vicious warriors. To understand the violent world in which the myths and legends are set, Bettany visits the bones of a 19-year-old-warrior who died more than 3,500 years ago. Healed sword marks and a large hole in his skull are a testament to his environment. In Sparta, the home town of Helen of Troy, Bettany discovers what made the region's warriors so feared before heading to Mycenae, likely home to the kings and queens that inspired the story of the Trojan War.

Bettany is nearing the end of her odyssey from the battlegrounds of ancient Troy to Odysseus's home in Ithaca. The Peloponnese is home to one of the greatest Bronze Age civilizations--the Mycenaeans--as well as the mythic heroes Helen of Troy, Agamemnon, and Odysseus himself. Bettany explores this peninsula's prosperous and violent past and discovers, through its human remains and golden treasures, just how much the ancient Greek's legendary tales are rooted in fact.

Historian Bettany Hughes is on the final leg of her Odyssey-inspired voyage and heading to the beautiful western islands that will lead her to Ithaca. She travels through the Corinth Canal - a feat of engineering that required the removal of 12 million cubic metres of earth. Follow her from the Peloponnesian city of Corinth, once a recruiting ground for Greek soldiers to fight in the Trojan War, then to Corfu, the "paradise on Earth" where Odysseus found salvation and a way to get back home. Here, her old friend Count Flamburiari reveals the island's close connections to Britain. From there, Bettany sails to Ithaca, Odysseus's home island, finally completing her 1,700-mile voyage across the Greek Islands. Like the Homeric hero she's been tracing, she encounters unsettling events that are, quite literally, earth-shaking. An earthquake measuring 4.9 on the Richter scale awakes her in the night.