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Modern Description: In 2004, an eighty-foot mid-4th century BC cargo-vessel, carrying around four hundred amphorae of wine was found underwater, wrecked in the channel between Chios and Oinoussai; and in the same year a Roman shipwreck with similar cargo was identified off the west of Chios. These are neither the first, nor the last, of many such submarine finds: each new season, it seems, brings more evidence of the formidable quantity of wine traded through these waters in Antiquity. The name Oinoussai, or ancient Oinousa, means ‘rich in wine'. That richness could have been in the production, but was more probably in the trading, of wine. The nine or ten islands that comprise the archipelago of Oinoussai, are not naturally rich in any produce; their economic potential lies solely in their strategic position as stepping-stones between Asia and Chios – proximity to the rich markets of Chios, Ephesus and Smyrna (Izmir), and a well-protected harbour. Without boats, and wine to trade, the islands would have been nothing. It is a parable of the indomitable Hellenic spirit – the Greek ‘emporiko pnevma' or ‘commercial enterprise' ¬– that these islands, which are about as productive as Coll or Tiree in the Hebrides, should have given rise to several of the wealthiest families in Europe, principally ship-brokers, who have dominated the international world of commercial navigation. Greek families still control, between them, the largest merchant navy in the world, and perhaps as many as a third of those families hail from these obscure islands in the channel between Turkey and Greece. Since earliest times boats have signified freedom and enterprise for the Greeks. Greek civilisation is predicated on them. And on the exchange of goods and ideas which they promote. On Oinoussai the choices for survival were simple: either boats or goat-herding.
Evidence of the mercantile potential of these islands can be inferred from a reference in Herodotus (Hist. I. 165): after the abandonment of their besieged city during the Ionian revolt, the people of Phocaea sailed to Chios and asked the Chians if they could purchase the islands of Oinoussai and settle there; Chios refused, fearing that the islands “might be made into a new centre of commerce to the exclusion of their own”. The Phocaeans were renowned seafarers and traders, and would not presumably have made such an offer had they not seen the island's hidden trading potential. Thereafter the islands are, in effect, an extension of Chiot territory and follow the history of their large and important neighbour. In the Middle Ages the islands were probably abandoned; repopulation from Kardámyla began in the 18th century. At the time of the 1822 massacre on Chios, the inhabitants fled to Syros, then the Aegean centre for Greek shipping. Within 40 years of returning to the island five years later, Oinoussaian families between them owned almost thirty ships, plying routes through the Mediterranean and Black Sea.
The emergence in the 19th century of three important families or ‘clans', in particular, on the island – the Hadjipateras, Lemos and Lyras families – and their formation of a consortium was the beginning of the story of long-distance, international shipping for Oinoussai. In 1905 they purchased their first steamer, the 3,500 ton, Marietta Rallis. With characteristic resilience, after substantial losses in the Second World War, the group took advantage of the possibility to purchase ‘Liberty Ships' (a standardised and rapidly built cargo ship of British design, which was produced in large numbers by American shipyards during the war) from the U.S. government, and contracted a number of new cargo ships from shipyards in Japan and Yugoslavia. In the 1950s the same group founded ‘Orient Mid-East Lines', which ran liner services between the USA, the Mediterranean and Far East. The Lemos family holding of shipping is by most measures the largest private holding in Greece, and one of the largest in the world. In 1962 the Pateras family built, and richly endowed, the Nunnery of the Evangelismos, at the west end of the island, in memory of a daughter of the family, Irini, who died at 20 and is considered by some a candidate for sanctification: the abbess of the convent is her mother.
Wikidata ID: Q1142304

Info: McGilchrist's Greek Islands

(From McGilchrist’s Greek Islands, © Nigel McGilchrist 2010, excerpted with his gracious permission. Click for the books)

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