Since ancient times Greece has been a seafaring nation. Because of its geography, the sea has always been the natural means of travel and communication, a medium of trade and exploration and a source of livelihood for fishermen – and also a means of waging war.
The mythical past
The story starts in the mythical/historic past of the Trojan War as recounted in the Iliad. Book 2 of Homer’s epic poem contains a Catalogue of Ships which lists the contingents of the Achaean army that sailed to Troy. There were 29 contingents under 46 captains, accounting for a total of 1,186 ships. Using the figure of 120 men per ship, known from the Boeotian contingent, a total of some 142,000 men would have been transported to the Trojan War. It may be remembered that in order to convince the Trojans to take in the wooden horse filled with Greek soldiers, finally breaking the siege of the city, the Greeks pretended to sail away in their ships.
Following the sack of Troy, as related in Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus/Ulysses, took 10 years to return to his realm on the island of Ithaca, facing numerous hazards thrown in his way by the gods, while his wife Penelope repelled all suitors, keeping faith in his eventual return. The story introduced the notion of “nostalgia”, derived from the Ancient Greek words nostos (homecoming) and algos (sorrow or despair), hence a longing to return home, which in modern parlance has become debased into a sentimental attachment to the past.
Odysseus is bound to his ship’s mast to prevent him yielding to the lure of the Sirens, on his journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan war. Detail from an Attic red-figured vase, ca. 480-470 BC, in the British Museum.
From the same period comes the story of Jason and the Argonauts, who were sent by Pelias, the ruler of Iolcos, to retrieve the fleece of a flying, winged ram named Crius Chrysomallos (golden-fleeced ram) from Aeëtes, the king of Colchis. Sailing in their ship, the Argo, they found their journey home beset with hazards matching those encountered by Odysseus, including an encounter with a bronze man named Talos which had been given to King Minos of Crete. Minos had Talos run around the island three times a day to keep the shores safe, and he started pelting the Argo with stones as it approached the island.
While Odysseus enjoyed the protection of the goddess Athena on his journey home, it was king Aeëtes’ daughter Medea – coincidentally the niece of Circe, who ensnared Odysseus and his men – who, again following the intervention of Athena, helped Jason with her potions and eventually married him.
The idea of homecoming is embodied in the title of the exhibition of works by the marine painter Konstantinos Volanakis – “Nostos of the Sea” – which has just closed at the Municipal Art Gallery in Chania. The 20th century Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy also treated the theme in his famous poem Ithaca, in which the voyage back to the island is presented as one of personal experience and development, perhaps more important than the homecoming, which may be felt as something of an anticlimax.
Greek seaborne expansion
In the Archaic Period of Greek history (800 to 480 BC), their mastery of seamanship enabled the Greeks to colonise the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, from Trebizond in the east to Hemeroscopium in what is now the Spanish province of Alicante. There were important settlements at Marseille, Syracuse in Sicily, Calabria and Apulia in southern Italy, and at Cyrene on the coast of modern-day Libya.
While many of the heroic battles of Ancient Greek history were fought on land, one of the most famous was the Battle of Salamis – a naval battle fought between an alliance of Greek city-states and the Achaemenid Empire of Persia in September 480 BC in the Saronic Gulf near Athens. Lured by the heavily outnumbered Greeks into the Straits of Salamis, where it could not manoeuvre, the Persian fleet was wiped out, and after further defeats the following year, the Persians made no more attempts to conquer the Greek mainland.
Modern Greek seafaring
The Greek tradition of seafaring has persisted into modern times, with shipping magnates such as Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos leaving an indelible imprint on 20th century Greece. After amassing huge wealth, Onassis founded the Greek national airline, Olympic, while on Niarchos’s death in 1996 his family established the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which has its base in Athens and has made billions of dollars worth of grants to non-profit organisations worldwide.
The Greek merchant fleet is the largest in the world in terms of deadweight tonnage, exceeding those of China and the UK. According to the annual report of the Union of Greek Shipowners for 2021-22, Greek shipowners control 5,514 vessels. The total capacity of the Greek-owned fleet has grown 45.8% since 2014, and since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic its capacity has grown by 7.4%. Greek shipowners control:
• 31.78% of the global oil tanker fleet
• 25.01% of the global bulk dry cargo fleet
• 22.35% of the global Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) transport fleet
• 15.60% of the global fleet of chemicals and petroleum products
• 13.85% of the global fleet of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG)
• 9.33% of the global fleet of container vessels.
(Greekcitytimes.com)
On a domestic level, despite the growth of air travel, ferries remain a vital means of communication between the Greek islands and the mainland. Greek ferry captains regularly perform heroic feats of seamanship to keep communications with isolated parts of the nation open during the winter. Island-hopping via ferry remains an essential ingredient of the overall tourist experience in a country which last year received three times its population in overseas visitors.
The sea in popular culture
With the sea playing such an important part in Greek life, it is not surprising that it is a recurrent theme in Greek popular culture and especially music. In Greek popular songs, the sea can become a metaphor for escape from the restrictions of everyday life, a celebration of the joys of high summer, or a symbol of separation and lost love.
Rebetiko, the music form which became popular in the 1930s, was probably imported from the coastal cities of Asia Minor, notably Smyrna, where it had flourished in “the ouzeri, the hashish dens with hookahs, coffee shops and even the prison” (Wikipedia). It was associated in particular with the figure of the mangas, the hard man whose snappy dress and arrogant behaviour made him a lower-class hero in urban centres such Athens, Piraeus and Thessaloniki. In Vasilis Tsitsanis’ To Vapori Ap’ tin Persia (the steamer from Persia), a ship loaded with 11 tons of hashish is impounded in Corinthia, leaving the “tough guys” crying over their loss.
In Tzamaika (Jamaica), with music by Manos Loizos and words by Lefteris Papadopoulos, the singer whiles away the hours of his merocamato (literally the daily wage, used as a shorthand for any boring menial job) dreaming of sailing away with his love to the Caribbean:
“Every morning as I set out for work
the fishing boats would be sailing off like birds.
Every morning, together with Minas, we planned
distant journeys as far as Jamaica.
And we floated on the ocean, my old love,
and later, in the evening, drunk in the taverns,
I drank you, my girl, like wine, drop by drop.
For years at the daily grind, with chisel and hammer,
I fashioned a hull for your pleasure.
On the stern I carved a mermaid,
and one night I became your ship’s master.
And we floated on the ocean, my old love,
and later, in the evening, drunk in the taverns,
I drank you, my girl, like wine, drop by drop.“
For the modern-day tourist, Greek island life has become synonymous with the three S’s – sun, sea and sand – and they are probably unaware of the difficult times islanders may experience during the winter. Krouaziera (Cruising), written and first sung by Vangelis Germanos in 1982, is a hymn to that lifestyle:
“The ship will sail in the evening.
Take the metro to Piraeus
and in the sweet summer days
we’ll go cruising to the islands.
We’ll float along on the waves,
our hair flying in the wind,
we’ll become experts in love,
and our thoughts will fly like birds.
Ah, ah, a-cruising I will take you
Ah, ah, because I care for you and I love you.
Ah, ah, Mykonos and Santorini,
Ah, ah, like a pair of love-struck penguins.
Let the miserable world shriek and yell
in bars, restaurants and pensions,
with sleeping bag and watermelon
we’ll wander round the islands.
We’ll swim naked on the seashore,
we’ll turn our faces to the sun,
I’ll have you like a Chinese fan,
and you’ll never go back to the office.
Ah, ah, a-cruising I will take you
Ah, ah, because I care for you and I love you.
Ah, ah, Mykonos and Santorini,
Ah, ah, like a pair of love-struck penguins.“
It might be possible to read meaning into the choice of penguins as a metaphor for the happy couple. They are after all seabirds, and they mate for life. However the simplest explanation is that pingouini (the Greek for penguins) provides a convenient rhyme with Santorini. Either way, it strikes a chord with live audiences, who always enthusiastically join in the refrain.
To What Sea are you Sailing?
In the song Se pia thalassa armenizeis? (To What Sea are you Sailing?), with music by Nikos Kallinis and words by Dimitra Neofytou, the singer envisages her lost lover sailing away, and wishes that she too could become a white sail fluttering in the wind:
To what sea are you sailing
and to what hidden shore
where are you going to, where are you wandering
what do you have in your mind…
Don’t torture me, and tell me
am I to blame for your pain?
Should I open my wounds
so that you can forget your own?
Every evening I remember you
night after night I love you
with the thought of you I go to sleep
with the thought of you I wake.
Other arms won’t do for me,
in other hands I cannot,
and as long as I think I am losing you
I drink tears for water.
May the waves become a bed for me
and a salty remedy,
all the love that I gave
has turned bad on me.
Come, breeze, and blow on me
make me into a white sail
take me and turn me over
that I may flutter and forget.
Every evening I remember you
night after night I love you
with the thought of you I go to sleep
with the thought of you I wake.
Other arms won’t do for me,
in other hands I cannot,
and as long as I think that I am losing you
I drink tears for water.
To What Sea are you Sailing? is a signature song of the popular singer Saveria Margiola, who on 1st September 2023 gave a concert at the Nikos Kazantzakis Theatre in Heraklion, sponsored by the Municipality. Under the same title, the 2-hour concert was a solo act, accompanied only by keyboard, percussion and lute/guitar, and covered a wide range of modern and older popular songs. Heraklion Arts and Culture is the Municipality’s YouTube channel devoted to cultural promotion and activities, and as Haniotika Nea announced last week, it has just uploaded the full 2-hour video of the concert, which can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMZU7AiamVY. Saveria Margiola is much praised for the beauty of her voice, and she charges her performances with a rare emotion.
