Greece aficionados who want to see the foundations of the country's modern urban culture should visit Syros instead of Athens.

Throughout much of the 19th century, the small Aegean island was what Piraeus would become — the beating heart of Greek shipping.

The maritime wealth accrued is visible to this day. Magnificent neoclassical buildings such as the Apollo Theatre — partly inspired by the Scala in Milan — adorn its capital, Ermoupolis.

Originally named Hermoupolis after the ancient Greek god of commerce, Hermes, Ermoupolis was built to modern urban plans when other Greek cities, including Athens, were still big villages with dirt roads.

Syros boomed because Greek shipping recovered quickly after the war of independence. The island became a hub for a Europe-wide network of Greek traders shifting commodities from Constantinople and Odessa to London.

It was at this time that Greeks began taking seats at the Baltic Coffee House, which later became the Baltic Exchange. By 1886, the Baltic's membership was 7% Greek.

Syros provided crews, shipbuilding, repair, maintenance, chartering and briefly insurance services — although the latter was hard to sustain due to a freight-rate crises that led to a wave of scuttlings.

More than half of Greek-owned tonnage in the middle of the 19th century was built at the island’s yards. One of them, ONEX Syros Shipyards, survives to this day as a major repair facility.

A statue of Panagis Vallianos, who set up the first modern Greek shipping office in Britain and financed the construction of the National Library in downtown Athens, which is seen in the background. Photo: Harry Papachristou

From trading to pure-play shipowning

However, the island’s days as a maritime hub were numbered. Global forces drove its demise, prompting the transition to bank-financed steamships and modern shipowning as we know it today.

The Syros network mainly worked with sail ships and their investors were commodity traders first and shipowners second.

However, by the second half of the 19th century, a new shipping generation had emerged. Stefanos Xenos, a flamboyant businessman, author, journalist and politician, operating out of London, was one of them.

I was born in 1898, on the same month my father bought his first steamship and sold the last family brig

Manolis Kulukundis

Using methods that are modern even by today’s standards, he began buying steamships at the end of the 1850s on the back of British finance and trading charters for Danube grain.

Xenos was in many ways ahead of his time and although his venture collapsed, the writing was on the wall for sail ships.

The transition to steamships was a watershed moment by which many Greek shipowners define their own personal histories.

“I was born in 1898, on the same month my father bought his first steamship and sold the last family brig,” Manolis Kulukundis — one of the most influential Greek owners and founder of the legendary Rethymnis & Kulukundis (R&K) shipping office — wrote in an autobiographical note.

In the decades that followed, a new Greek maritime network sprang up around London and Piraeus, which had been until then a peripheral station for bunkers and provisions.

This involved investors — mainly from the western Greek islands of the Ionian Sea — who were shipowners first and traders second. Some were rich Greeks who specialised in shipping to avoid entering fierce competition from other nationalities in banking or trading.

A major innovation came in 1860, when Panagis Vallianos set up a shipping office in London, which has served as a model for outfits since.

Greek strategies

Providing chartering, sale-and-purchase and even ship-finance services, the Vallianos clan became big owners in their own right and also served as a focal point for one-ship entrepreneurs.

By the early 20th century, most of the business strategies that Greek shipowners continue to apply to great success to this day were firmly in place.

This included businesses such as R&K mastering the art of countercyclical investing, opportunistic sales and acquisitions of secondhand ships, the mass buying of standardised vessels, and managing mixed fleets of ultra-modern, capital-intensive vessels and creaky old buckets on their last legs.

Before World War II began, Greek-owned shipping was the world’s ninth-biggest. Its tramp shipping, however, was already in second place, just behind Britain’s.

The stage for Greek shipping’s post-war victory march had been set in motion long before legendary owners such as Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos even appeared.

This article is part of a series of stories looking back at the history of Greek shipping, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the country's independence