Vafias, Angelakos, Kollakis, Logothetis, and the Wider Community

The families in the preceding chapters are the largest and the best documented, but they are not the community. Greek shipping is made up of several hundred private firms, most of them owning between two and thirty ships, most of them family-run, and most of them essentially invisible outside the trade. A very substantial proportion of them are Chian, Oinoussian, or married into families that are, and it is this long tail — not the handful of giants — that produces the aggregate tonnage figures that make the arithmetic of chapter 46 work.

Several deserve naming.

Vafias. The Vafias family runs one of the more visible of the modern Greek houses, and its structure is instructive because it spans the private and public models simultaneously. The family's older business, Brave Maritime, built under Nikolas Vafias, operates in the traditional private manner across bulk and tanker tonnage. Alongside it, Stealth Maritime Corporation provides management, and Harry Vafias, of the succeeding generation, founded StealthGas in 2004 and took it to NASDAQ in 2005 — a specialist in the small and mid-size LPG carrier segment, the ships that move liquefied petroleum gas in parcels too small for the giant carriers, serving a fragmented trade that the very large owners tend to ignore.

That specialisation is worth noting as a strategy. The Chian giants of chapter 51 compete on scale in the biggest and most capital-intensive segments. The smaller houses frequently compete instead by finding a niche where scale confers less advantage and where deep operational knowledge does — small gas carriers, specialised chemical tankers, particular regional trades — and by dominating it. Harry Vafias has subsequently launched further listed vehicles in tankers and dry bulk, making the family unusually prominent in the small but growing group of Greek owners who use the public equity markets as a matter of course rather than as a last resort.

Angelakos. The Angelakos family, operating principally as Angelakos (Hellas), is a long-established private dry-bulk house of exactly the type described at the start of this chapter: family-controlled, modest in profile, operating a fleet of bulk carriers across the world's grain, ore, and coal trades, with the traditional Greek combination of a Piraeus operating office and London commercial connections. There are dozens of firms of this shape and they are the backbone of the sector.

Kollakis. The Kollakis family likewise belongs to the community of Chian-origin owners running private fleets across the postwar decades and into the present, and the family name recurs in the ownership and management registers and in the philanthropic record on the island.

Logothetis. The clearest modern echo of the Ralli pattern described in chapter 42. The Chian connection runs through the maternal line — the Kalamotousis family of Kalamoti, one of the mastic villages of the southern plain — and the family maintains a presence on the island. Lomar Shipping was founded by Michael Logothetis in 1976 with a single vessel; George Logothetis took it over in the mid-1990s while still in his twenties, bought hard into a depressed market, and in 2003 the family founded the Libra Group, a diversified holding company spanning aviation leasing, hospitality, renewable energy, real estate and finance across dozens of countries. It is Pandia Ralli's logic updated: cash flow from one violently cyclical industry redeployed into others that do not move in step with it.

Beyond these there are the names that recur constantly in any list of Greek owners and that have Chian or Oinoussian roots: Xylas, Fafalios, Lignos, Frangos, Los, Sarlis, Zolotas, Mavroleon, Kulukundis — the last two of Kasos rather than Chios, but so thoroughly intermarried with the Chian houses in London that any account of the community must include them.

Two further observations about this wider group.

The first is that the boundaries between families are far softer than a list suggests. After four or five generations of intermarriage between Kardamyla, Vrontados, Oinousses, and the older Kambos merchant families — and, increasingly, with the shipping families of Andros, Kasos, Cephalonia and Ithaca — the community is a single dense kinship network with many surnames rather than a set of separate dynasties. A firm bearing one name will typically have capital, directors, and management drawn from several others. This is precisely why the tonnage attribution discussed in the next chapter is so difficult, and it is also the community's greatest structural asset: capital, information, crew, and credit move within it at very low friction.

The second is that the small and medium houses are where the model is most purely visible. The giants have professional finance departments, chartering desks, and newbuilding programmes, and they look, from a distance, like large corporations that happen to be family-owned. A twelve-ship Chian dry bulk firm looks like what the industry actually is: a handful of relatives in an office in Piraeus or Athens, with a wall of vessel photographs, a superintendent who was a chief engineer, a chartering manager who has known the same brokers for thirty years, and a set of decisions about when to buy and when to sell that will be made around a table by people who have been arguing with each other since childhood.