Livanos, and the Two Sons-in-Law

The pivotal figure of the modern era, and the man from whom a great deal of what follows descends, is Stavros George Livanos (1891–1963), of Kardamyla.

He came from a Kardamyla family with seafaring connections — his father is generally described as a schoolmaster and small shipowner — and he entered the business in the years around the First World War. He bought his first vessels in the early 1920s, when the war's end had left the world with a vast surplus of tonnage and prices had collapsed. That was the first application of an instinct that would define him and that would define the whole Chian model: buy when nobody else will.

He moved his base to London in the 1930s and to New York during the Second World War, and it was in the immediate postwar years that his position became commanding. The Liberty ships — the standardised 10,000-deadweight-ton cargo vessels turned out by American yards during the war at a rate that remains one of the wonders of industrial history, over 2,700 of them — were surplus in 1945. Under the Ship Sales Act of 1946 the United States offered them at prices that in retrospect look extraordinary, in the region of half a million dollars each with a substantial portion financeable. Greek owners bought them in quantity, with the Greek government guaranteeing a first tranche of a hundred and private buyers taking many more. Livanos was among the largest purchasers.

He was famous in the trade for two things. The first was that he did not sell. The saying attributed to him is that he never sold a ship, only bought them, and while that is not literally true, it captures a strategy of accumulation across cycles that was distinctly unusual at the time and that compounded remarkably over forty years. The second was his aversion to debt and to partners. He operated on his own money to a degree that his more spectacular contemporaries did not, which meant that he was never a forced seller into a bad market — the condition that has destroyed more shipowners than any storm.

At its height his fleet was among the largest privately owned in the world, spanning tankers, bulk carriers, and general cargo, and by the 1950s he was one of the wealthiest Greeks alive.

But Livanos's greatest historical significance is dynastic, and it is why his name is permanently attached to the two most famous Greeks of the twentieth century.

He married Arietta Zafirakis, herself of a Chian shipping family, and they had three children: Eugenia, Athina — universally called Tina — and George.

In 1946, Tina Livanos married Aristotle Onassis. In 1947, Eugenia Livanos married Stavros Niarchos.

Onassis and Niarchos: the two men whose names defined shipping in the public imagination for thirty years, whose rivalry was conducted through supertankers, art collections, islands, wives, and litigation, and who between them built the era of the giant tanker. They were brothers-in-law. And their common father-in-law was a shipowner from a village on Chios.

Neither of them was Chian, and that is exactly the point. Onassis was from Smyrna, a refugee of 1922, who had made his first money in tobacco in Buenos Aires before coming into shipping in the 1930s. Niarchos was born in Athens of Laconian descent and came in through his mother's family's grain business. Both were brilliant outsiders. Both married into the establishment — and in mid-twentieth-century Greek shipping, the establishment they married into was Chian.

The subsequent family history is turbulent to the point of Greek tragedy, and it is well documented because both men were relentlessly followed by the press. Tina divorced Onassis in 1960, after his affair with Maria Callas became public; she then married the Marquess of Blandford, heir to the Duke of Marlborough; and then, after her sister Eugenia's death in 1970, she married Stavros Niarchos — her sister's widower. Tina herself died in 1974, at forty-five. Eugenia's death in 1970 on the Niarchos island of Spetsopoula was investigated by the Greek authorities and the circumstances remain disputed to this day. Onassis's son Alexander was killed in an air crash in 1973 and his father never recovered. Christina Onassis, Tina's daughter, inherited one of the world's great fortunes and died in 1988 at thirty-seven. Her daughter Athina is the sole surviving direct descendant of both Onassis and Livanos.

George Livanos (1935–2022), Stavros's son, inherited the Livanos fleet and ran it for the second half of the century with a determined and almost total avoidance of publicity, which stands in instructive contrast to his brothers-in-law and which is by far the more typical Chian posture. The Livanos shipping interests continue under family control. The Livanos name is on the school, the church, and the harbour works at Kardamyla, and on a good deal else besides.