The Institutions

The Chian families did not merely own ships. They built and staffed a great deal of the institutional apparatus through which Greek shipping operates, and much of that apparatus is Chian in origin, in funding, or in leadership.

The Greek Shipping Cooperation Committee, founded in London in 1935, is the collective body of Greek shipowners operating from the City — historically the largest concentration of Greek shipping management outside Greece itself. It represents its members before British and international authorities, coordinates on regulatory matters, and functions as the community's institutional centre in London. Its role during the Second World War, when the Greek merchant fleet was placed at the service of the Allied cause and suffered proportionate losses that were among the heaviest of any merchant marine, was considerable. Chian families have been prominent in it from the beginning.

The Union of Greek Shipowners, founded in 1916 and based in Piraeus, is the industry's principal representative body within Greece, and conducts the permanent negotiation between the sector and the Greek state over taxation, flag policy, and manning. Chian family members have repeatedly held its leadership.

Internationally, Greek owners — and Chian owners specifically — have been consistently prominent in INTERTANKO and INTERCARGO, the associations of independent tanker and dry cargo owners; in BIMCO; and in the International Chamber of Shipping, and thus in the negotiation at the International Maritime Organization of the conventions that govern safety, pollution, and now carbon emissions. Somebody has to sit in those rooms for years at a time, and it is a striking feature of this community that families who will not give an interview to a newspaper will spend a decade chairing a technical committee.

Where the investment is most concentrated, and most visible, is in maritime education.

The Merchant Marine Academy of Oinousses, established in the 1960s through the endowment of the island's shipping families, trains deck officers for the Greek fleet. An island of a few hundred permanent residents maintaining a national-level officer training academy is, on its own, a fair summary of the entire phenomenon this section has been describing.

The Maria Tsakos Foundation supports maritime training and research in Greece and in Uruguay. Numerous individual family foundations fund cadet berths, scholarships, simulators, and the training ships of the Greek academies.

The economic logic is straightforward, and the families are entirely open about it. Greek-officered ships have been a competitive advantage for a century; the supply of young Greeks willing to go to sea has been declining for decades as shore careers become more attractive; and the owners have a direct interest in maintaining the pipeline. That the interest is self-interested does not make the academies less real.

Then there are the museums. The Maritime Museum of Oinousses, founded by the island's families, and the Chios Maritime Museum, in a neoclassical mansion in Chios town, hold ship models, instruments, charts, flags, logbooks, portraits, and archives of genuine quality. Both are shipowner-funded, and both are markedly better than a visitor has any reason to expect.

And finally the philanthropy at home, which is impossible to miss on the island. The hospital, the schools, the libraries, the retirement homes, the harbour improvements, the restoration of churches, and much of the cultural infrastructure of Chios carry the names of shipping families. The Korais Library in Chios town — one of the largest in Greece, built around Adamantios Korais's own bequest — has been sustained for two centuries by exactly this mechanism. Churches in Kardamyla, Vrontados, and Oinousses have been rebuilt and are maintained by families commemorated on their walls.

None of it is disinterested. It maintains standing in the community that supplies officers, captains, and spouses; it discharges an obligation the community expects to be discharged; and in a business where reputation is the principal form of capital, it is extremely good practice. It is also, in its effect on the public services of a small island, entirely real.