Postcard from Syros: a microcosm of maritime heritage

“The sea is our element,” says Dimitris Stavrakopoulos. “At heart, every Greek is an Odysseus.” It’s hard to argue with this statement in the circumstances. Stavrakopoulos is steering the carved tiller of his kaiki with his foot, as he navigates the ferries, cargo ships and other vessels plying the port of Hermoupolis, capital of the Cyclades. Nattily dressed in a black sailor’s cap and a claret-coloured sweater that matches the paintwork of his wooden boat, the Kallia M, Stavrakopoulos looks every bit the heroic seafarer.

The island of Syros is a microcosm of Greece’s maritime history. We putter beneath hulking tankers moored in the shipyard — founded in 1856 when the nation’s first steamships were built here — past the stately homes of Vaporia, where 19th-century shipowners watched their vessels come and go from their waterfront verandas.

During the Greek war of independence in the 1820s, wealthy merchants fled the islands close to Asia Minor and established vast fleets and fortunes on Syros, transforming it into the shipping capital of the Aegean. The locals had been building more modest boats for millennia: as we cruise along the deserted north-east coastline, Stavrakopoulos points to the ancient settlement of Chalandriani, where Bronze Age engravings of longboats have been found.

Kaikia, such as the Kallia M, are the small, traditional wooden boats found in the Ionian and Aegean — short-masted, famously seaworthy, and usually built without plans by the boatbuilder’s memory alone. Designed as fishing boats, tenders or to transport goods, livestock and people, long before there were any roads or ferries, these boats were built to last. They are part of the postcard view of any Greek island port, and yet they are becoming scarcer — during the past 30 years, almost 14,000 have been destroyed under an EU directive designed to prevent overfishing. As well as giving up their fishing licence, fishermen must scrap their vessel to qualify for a generous subsidy.

Not all fishermen take the bait, many saying the scrappage policy would be better aimed at the industrial-scale fishing boats that cause far greater damage to the marine environment. Some, such as the Kallia M on Syros, Stavros, or Ayia Thalassini on Spetses are instead being repurposed from fishing vessels to boats that carry visitors on leisure trips. “It never even crossed my mind to destroy her,” says the Kallia M’s original owner, Captain Nikolas Zannis, his blue eyes ablaze. I find him huddled over a mid-morning ouzo at the portside kafenio, the unofficial clubhouse of all the fishermen, dockworkers and retired seamen on Syros. “I worked on that fishing boat for 35 years. I raised a family, put my kids through college, and bought them each a house with that little diamond . . .”

I decided to build scale models of all the different types of kaiki, so that future historians will know exactly how they are made

You don’t have to dig deep to discover traces of Syros’s boatbuilding heritage. In the scrappy marina beyond the shipyard, a handful of shipwrights continue to practise their craft — stubbornly, patiently, lovingly sanding decks, caulking hulls, occasionally even coaxing planks into frames. “I can’t remember the last time we had an order for a new boat,” says Manolis Zorzos, whose father, Mastro-Yannis “Fouskis”, built the Kallia M in 1983.

Manolis and his brother Nikos learnt to build boats when they were schoolboys; these are skills and trade secrets handed down from father to son, mentor to apprentice. “There were no manuals or ledgers: the master craftsmen wrote their notes straight on to these wooden ‘tracks’,” says Manolis, showing me how curved moulds are adjusted to shape the vessel’s ribs. “The number of holes represents the number of boats they built using this particular mould. My father built over 900 kaikia.”

Although Greece’s fishing fleet is the largest in the EU, it is shrinking fast, along with dwindling fish stocks in the Mediterranean — a problem exacerbated by the industrial trawlers that ravage the seabed. Today, only about 20 traditional boatyards have survived, six of them on Syros. (You can tell who built each boat by the symbol — a star, a dolphin, an initial — carved into the prow.) With precious few apprentices, this wealth of knowledge is in danger of disappearing.

“I decided to build scale models of all the different types of kaiki, so that future historians will know exactly how they are made,” Manolis tells me. In his orderly workshop, two cats are curled up on the colourful deck of one of the model boats, which take about a year to build. Each model comes with an album of photographs, documenting every step of the process and explaining each piece of the complex puzzle in the boatbuilder’s lexicon.

Ironically, while one arm of the Greek state oversees their destruction, the ministry of culture has decreed wooden boatbuilding part of the country’s intangible cultural heritage. “We don’t want kaikia to become museum artefacts, we want them to be a living part of our culture,” says Stavrakopoulos, who is on a mission to preserve the professions and traditions associated with wooden boats through his non-profit organisation, Hermoupolis Heritage. 

The Kallia M is a perfect example of how hard-working kaikia can be repurposed as pleasure boats, offering an experience very different to the white-fibreglass gin palaces common elsewhere in the Mediterranean. As we circumnavigate Syros, the steady rumble of the engine reverberates with the gentle roll and swell of the waves. We cast anchor at Didymi, a tiny, thyme-scented island that’s home to hundreds of squalling seagulls, the oldest lighthouse in Greece and two bays of diaphanous blue. Lunch — cured anchovies, tender octopus, salty-sweet tomatoes rinsed in the sea — is eaten on board below Agios Stefanos, a fantastical chapel inside a sea-cave, on the craggy south-west coast of Syros. After our floating feast, we scramble up the steps to light a candle in the spartan chapel, the sea framed in the tiny window.

This is a version of Greece you hardly dare to believe still exists. It will survive, so long as these beautifully made boats remain at sea.

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