Elias Kulukundis — author of some of the most gripping shipping books — died on 3 July from cancer in his home on the Aegean island of Syros, Greece. He was just a couple of weeks shy of his 83rd birthday.
Born into one of the country’s most influential shipping families, Kulukundis became a shipowner relatively late in life, after being an academic, a writer, political activist and documentary maker.
He leaves a remarkable legacy in his candid autobiographical books. Unlike the self-celebratory accounts produced by many of his peers, Kulukundis' work paints a vivid and unflinching image of the psychological strains of growing up in an established, wealthy shipping family.
“My whole life, my biggest wish was to have a normal life,” he said in his last book, Bold Coasts, which was published in 2017.
Asset player
Kulukundis eventually became a shipowner in his own right and on his own terms — mainly as an asset player through his outfit Kulukundis Shipping Investments.
“I had to go into shipping because I knew I would never be much of a writer if I did not understand my heritage,” he explained. Kulukundis also used to say that he had to be interested in the operation of a ship to some extent, but that was never his passion.
An iconoclast by nature, Kulukundis never hesitated to do business with outsiders — something considered nothing short of treason when he was still at family company Rethymnis & Kulukundis.
He refused to identify the two Greek brothers he secretly cooperated with at the time. Kulukundis later did business with Scandinavian companies, such as Torm and Belships, in which he became a minority shareholder in 2018.
Dissident capitalist
“British by birth, Greek by parentage and American by education”, as he described himself, Kulukundis earned a bachelor’s degree in literature and a master of arts in teaching from Harvard University.
In pursuit of a literary career, he travelled to the Soviet Union in the 1960s to secretly meet dissident writer Viktor Nekrasov, whose book Both Sides of the Ocean he translated from Russian.
Thinking about the episode, Kulukundis said he probably saw in Nekrasov’s dissent a reflection of his own misgivings about the society of his parents, which had equally dogmatic ideas about the way one was supposed to live as the Soviet authorities in communist Russia did.
Kulukundis later became a counsellor to draft resisters fleeing the US to Canada during the Vietnam War. To the horror of many in New York shipping circles sympathetic to Greece's then military junta, he carried out a daring coup against the regime in 1969.
Entering the country on a fake Danish passport, he posed as a tourist travelling the Aegean to approach the remote island of Amorgos where his father-in-law was held captive, and helped him escape abroad.
Kulukundis was buried in a closed family funeral at the Prophet Elias church on Syros. A memorial will likely be held when the Covid-19 epidemic abates enough to allow safe travel and public gatherings.
