The Oinousses Houses

If Kardamyla produced the most famous names, the little island of Oinousses produced the greatest concentration of them, and the character of its shipping is different — quieter, more conservative, more collective, and in the long run at least as successful.

Lemos. The Lemos family is among the oldest and largest of the Oinoussian houses, with a documented shipowning presence reaching back into the nineteenth century and multiple distinct branches — which makes it genuinely difficult for an outsider to follow, since there are Lemos shipping companies that are entirely separate businesses run by cousins who compete with one another.

The celebrated individual is Costas M. Lemos (1910–1995), known throughout the industry simply as C.M. He went to sea as a young man, came ashore into the family business, and from the 1940s onward built one of the largest independently owned tanker fleets in the world; through the 1970s he was routinely described as controlling more tanker deadweight than any other individual alive. He was intensely, almost pathologically private — he gave essentially no interviews, avoided being photographed, and is remembered by people who dealt with him as courteous, silent, and extremely quick. He was famous for two things beyond his fleet: an aversion to debt so complete that he was said to finance newbuildings from cash, and an instinct for the top of a market that his competitors found uncanny. He was a very large benefactor of Oinousses and of Greek maritime education.

Other Lemos branches founded their own enterprises across dry bulk and tankers throughout the postwar decades, and continue today.

Pateras. The Pateras family is, if anything, even more ramified than the Lemos, and the name is one of the oldest in Greek shipping. There are numerous branches, all originating on Oinousses, running separate companies, and the name appears across dozens of firms over a century and a half. The Pateras houses have been particularly associated with dry bulk. The family has produced a very long line of masters and chief engineers as well as owners — which is the more telling fact, because it means the family has been supplying not just capital but competence, generation after generation. A great deal of the built infrastructure of Oinousses carries the name.

Hadjipateras. A related but distinct Oinoussian house, with London and Piraeus operations of long standing across dry cargo and tankers, and likewise a major benefactor of the island. The Hadjipateras and Pateras families between them have been running ships continuously since the age of sail.

Lyras. An Oinoussian family with a long shipping record and, unusually, a prominent institutional role: Lyras family members have held senior positions in the collective bodies of Greek shipping, including the Greek Shipping Cooperation Committee in London and the Union of Greek Shipowners, and in the international associations through which owners deal with regulators and governments. In an industry where most owners are determinedly invisible, someone has to sit in the committee rooms, and the Lyras family has done a disproportionate share of it.

Los, Fafalios, Frangos, Lignos and other Oinoussian names run through the ownership registers of the whole postwar period, generally as private dry-bulk operators of anything from a handful to several dozen ships.

The character of this group deserves emphasis, because it is not the picture of Greek shipping that the public has. The image is Onassis: the yacht, the opera singer, the island, the feud. The Oinoussian reality is almost the opposite. These are, in the main, conservative dry-cargo operators who buy well-found secondhand ships or order sensible newbuildings, run them for a long time, keep leverage modest, employ officers from the island and from Greece, avoid publicity to a degree that borders on the eccentric, and persist.

Persistence is the operative word. Several of these houses have been in continuous operation under family control for a century or more, through the collapse of the 1930s, the destruction of the Greek fleet in the Second World War, the tanker depression of 1973–87, the Asian crisis, the crash of 2008, and everything since. In an industry where the median firm's life expectancy is roughly one cycle, that is the salient and the astonishing fact.

Oinousses is maintained by them, entirely and visibly. The Merchant Marine Academy of Oinousses, established in the 1960s with shipowner funding, trains deck officers for the Greek fleet — an island of eight hundred people running a national officer training school. The Maritime Museum of Oinousses, founded by the island's shipping families, holds a serious collection. The church, the school, the medical facilities, the harbour, and the roads are shipowner-funded. And in August, when the families come home, the population multiplies several times over and the harbour is unrecognisable.