It is said that Kefalonia derives its name from King Kephalos, the legendary founder of its four ancient cities - Sami, Pahli, Krani and Pronnoi - named after his four children.

Kefalonia was made up of four autonomous city states in its earliest civilisation, each with their own coinage.

In Homeric times (around 1,200 BC), Kefalonia formed part of the kingdom of Odysseus.

The first known reference to 'Kefallines' can be found in Homer's Iliad, although this refers to Odysseus' people on several of the Ionian islands.

There is strong evidence to suggest that Kefalonia was actually Homer's Ithaca and the Mycenean ruins excavated at Tzanata-Poros were once home to Odysseus - Kefalonia and Ithaca have not always been known by their present names.

The island has been famous throughout the centuries for its silver fir trees whose aromatic aroma still pervades parts of the island.

Found only on Kefalonia and in certain parts of Russia and Canada, the trees' wood is ideal for shipbuilding;

Odysseus made good use of it when building his fleet as did the Venetians some 2000 years later.

It is said that Napoleon's first question, when introduced to a Kefalonian, was regarding the firs that grew on the 'Mighty Mountain', Enos.

Sami, the most important of the ancient cities, was located close to the modern port of the same name.

Its ruins can still be found in the hills above the town.

Famous for its resistance to Roman invasion, the residents heroically defended themselves for over four months before their inevitable defeat.

Every surviving man, woman and child was then slaughtered or sold into slavery!

The Romans particularly wanted to occupy Kefalonia as a strategic point from which to attack the mainland.

Kefalonia became an important administrative centre and key defence point during the Byzantine period (from the 4th century AD), as the North African pirates, the Saracens, ravaged the Mediterranean coast.

For over two hundred years many of the battles between the Mediterraneans and Saracens took place in the Ionian.

Most of the inhabitants of the islands lived in villages up in the hillsides, away from the coast to escape the Saracen threat.

At the end of the eleventh century, the island was taken from the west by the Normans, Francs and Orsini.

One of their feudal lords, Robert Guiscard, gave his name to the harbour town of Fiscardo where he died in 1085.

Its was during this time that Count Matteo Orsini ruled Kefalonia alongside Count Vetrano from 1194.

When the Venetians executed Vetrano a decade later, Orsini put all his possessions under their rule although it was not until some years later, after the fall of Constantinople, that the Venetians finally claimed the island as their own.

When a later Count, Charles Toskos, died, his wife went on to rule the island.

The court of Francesca, Queen of the Romans, as she was known, was renowned for the beautiful ladies that resided there.

Not suprisingly, Kefalonia became a popular destination for young men!

Kefalonia was still occupied by the Venetians when the first wave of Turkish attacks, led by the blood-thirsty Ahmed Pasha, were made around 1480.

Historian William Miller describing the events wrote that Pasha; 'chopped up all the nobility, burnt the cast le of Kefalonia and transported many of the peasants to Constantinople.

There, the sultan separated the men from the women and forced the men to marry women from Ethiopia and vice-versa in order to create a race of semi-coloured people to use as slaves.

Again the Venetians fought back and after two years of Turkish occupation the island was theirs once more.

Well, not for long, as the Venetians ended up giving it back to the Turks in a treaty in 1485!

The Turkish soldiers garrisoned at St Georgios castle were notoriously cruel to the local population who abandoned the low lands almost immediately, leaving their homes and crops untended.

The island was in a desolate state when the Venetians and Spanish won their crusade against the Ottoman Turks in 1500 to gain control once more of Kefalonia.

It was the strategic importance of Kefalonia that attracted the fleet of Venice; Venetian ships finding shelter from attack in Kefalonian ports and the island serving as a valuable stepping stone to the east.

For most of this period St Georgios was the island's political centre but after a huge earthquake severely damaged the fort in 1757, the capital was moved to the port of Argostoli.

For nearly 500 years Venetian culture has been deeply embedded into that of the Ionian.

From Venice came fashions, art, music, letters, its education and health systems, its laws and architecture and even the tomato! It was the Venetians who were responsible for the planting of many of the olive trees that can still be found on the island.

Venetian rule came to an end in 1797 when the French gained control of Venice's overseas possesions.

The islanders welcomed the French with their revolutionary ideology, planting symbolic trees of liberty in the main squares and hoisting up the Tricolour.

Peace, however, did not last long after revolts broke out.

1800 saw the formation of the Eftanisos -the State of seven islands.

It did not, however, last long!

After another brief occupation by the French, the Napoleonic wars broke out and the island came under British control in the early years of the 19th Century.

Of the seventeen British governors who ruled Kefalonia, only Sir Charles Napier is was looked upon favourably.

His great affection for the island is obvious from the name of his daughter, Emily Kefalonia.

The support he offered mainland Greece in the war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, despite Britain's official opposition, was characteristic of his behaviour.

One of the most famous supporters of the Greek War of Independence, Lord Byron, visited the island in the early 1820s.

It was whilst residing at Metaxata that he composed Don Juan.

The statue of Vlaskarados in Lixouri stands testament to Kefalonia's endemic poverty in the earlier part of the nineteenth century.

Vlaskarados had a large family and, receiving little help from the church, constantly heckled the local priest until he was finally excommunicated.

In Greek aforismos, which means to excommunicate, also means that the body will not decompose after death.

The man's response to his excommunication was to hold up the shoes of his children begging the priest that he excommunicate them too as he could not afford to replace them!

In 1863, after a long and bloody struggle, the London Protocole treaty was signed.

It states, "The islands, Corfu, Kefalonia, Zakynthos, Lefkas, Ithaca, Kythira, Paxos and the other little ones are united with the kingdom of Greece in order to be its part forever, in one and only state" and with that the struggle for Greek independence was won.

Yiannis Metaxas, Prime Minister of Greece during the second world war, (who famously refused Mussolini's pre-war ultimatum), was himself a Kefalonian.

The island, and most of Greece, was occupied during WW2 by both the Italians and the Nazis and the islanders suffered greatly at the hands of the latter invaders.

Kefalonia suffered another disaster in 1953, this time of the natural kind, when the island was shaken to ruins by the earthquake that racked western Greece.

There had previously existed some 365 villages on the island; today that number is greatly reduced and you will see very little pre-earthquake architecture in its entirety.

Fiscardo is one of the few places that escaped almost intact.

The island today is one of the wealthiest of the Ionians, many of Greece's successful ship merchants having come from Kefalonia - the Onassis island, Scorpios, is not far away off the coast of Lefkas.

Kefalonians have always had a reputation for their enterprising nature and many have sought their fortunes abroad.

Indeed, Kefalonian doctors can be found all over the world.

Such is their renown that mothers it was said would pray that their new born girls would be happy and marry a doctor, although nowadays they would probably wish their future husbands to be a ship owner or a hotelier!