Chandris, Carras, and the Business of Carrying People

Two Chian families took a conspicuously different route from everyone else in this section: instead of carrying cargo, they carried people. It is a far riskier business — cargo does not complain, sue, or stop buying tickets in a recession — and both families made a great deal of money out of it.

Chandris. The Chandris family of Chios entered shipping between the wars and after 1945 built the largest Greek-owned passenger shipping business in the world.

The brothers Anthony and John Chandris founded Chandris Lines, and from the 1950s its central business was one of the great population movements of the twentieth century: the emigrant trade to Australia. Assisted and unassisted migrants — British, Greek, Italian, Yugoslav, Maltese, Cypriot — went south by the shipload, and Chandris carried an enormous number of them. The firm's method was characteristically Greek: buy the great liners of the established companies secondhand, at the moment when the airlines were destroying their original trade and their owners were desperate; refit them, often drastically, for high-density passenger service; and run them hard on a route the majors had abandoned.

The ships have names that mean a great deal to a particular generation of Australians and New Zealanders: Patris, Ellinis, Australis, Britanis, Ithaca, Queen Frederica. For several hundred thousand families, a Chandris ship is where the family's history in the southern hemisphere begins, and there are Australian community associations and reunion groups devoted to specific voyages to this day.

As jet aircraft finished off the liner trade in the late 1960s and 1970s, Chandris pivoted into cruising, operating Chandris Cruises and the Fantasy Cruises brand in the Caribbean and Mediterranean.

And then, in 1988, the family did something almost no Greek shipping house has ever managed: it built a genuinely successful premium consumer brand from nothing. Celebrity Cruises was launched with purpose-designed newbuildings, positioned deliberately above the mass-market operators on service, food, and design, and it worked, quickly and decisively. In 1997 the family sold Celebrity to Royal Caribbean in a transaction valued at around $1.3 billion. The brand is still sailing.

That is worth pausing on, because it cuts against the stereotype. The conventional wisdom holds that Greek shipowners are asset traders who buy steel cheap and sell it dear and have no interest in brands, marketing, or consumers. The Chandris family took a fortune made in exactly that way and used it to build a luxury consumer business from scratch, against entrenched American competition, and then sold it at the top. The family's remaining interests continue in shipping, property, and hospitality.

Carras. The Carras — Karras — family, also of Chios and of Kardamyla stock, built a substantial cargo and tanker fleet through the postwar decades. The name best known outside the industry is John Carras, who took a very large amount of shipping money and spent it on something entirely unlike shipping.

Porto Carras is an integrated resort development on the Sithonia peninsula of Halkidiki in northern Greece, built from the 1960s onward on a scale that had no Greek precedent: hotels, a marina, a golf course, a village, and one of the largest single organised vineyards in the country, planted from the 1960s with the advice of the great Bordeaux oenologist Émile Peynaud and producing wine under the Domaine Porto Carras label. It was, and remains, one of the very few attempts by a Greek shipowner to build a major land-based industry inside Greece rather than exporting the capital, and its financial history was correspondingly complicated — land-based investment in Greece has bankrupted better men than shipping ever did. The family has also produced notable figures in Greek environmental and cultural philanthropy.

Between them, Chandris and Carras complicate the picture usefully. Chian shipowners are not all conservative bulk operators who avoid publicity. Some of them took very large, very visible, brand-building consumer risks. One produced a billion-dollar exit; the other produced a wine region.