URSABLOG: En Passant

I was in my usual favourite place: drinking coffee, reading a book, with a packet of cigarettes to hand on the aft deck of a ferry sailing east. The sun was beginning to set behind us as we approached the southwestern tip of Ikaria. The effects of the ever-present meltemi, blowing steadily from the north, were dissipating now as we approached the shelter of the weather shore, and I watched as the granite bedrock made tortuous and striated patterns in the cliffs above, until they were gradually replaced by the limestone blocks that make up most of the southern coast. All was right with the world.

Until about ten minutes later, when suddenly the wind started to pick up again, twirling the lighter objects on deck into the air: I grabbed my cigarettes and lighter before they were plucked from me, and put my book – the pages were fluttering so violently that it was impossible to read – safely in my bag. Other passengers were experiencing similar problems.

The surface of the sea was being similarly tormented, as we began to be buffeted by spray  whipped up by the capricious wind. The meltemi – having being pushed up and over the mountains on its way south – was being sucked back down to the sea, creating a maelstrom below. The ferry – big, resolute, powerful – carried on pushing its way towards the port of Agios Kirikos; it took some time for it to manoeuvre and berth stern on. The cars and lorries were discharged quickly, those due to board were hurried on their way, and the passengers embarking and disembarking scurried around holding on to their hats, and smaller items of luggage as they sought shelter out of the wind.

And then it was over. The stern lines were dropped, the propellers pushed the port away, and we were once again at sea, away from the swirling and snatching gusts tumbling over the mountains, and back to the steady power of the meltemi pushing us towards Fournoi, my final destination.

I stayed there for three to four days, and I loved it, exploring the beaches and coves, swimming in the glorious seas, eating and walking, but always to the accompaniment of the meltemi, sighing me to sleep, singing me awake. As I drove back one evening from a taverna on the beach on the other side of the island, I saw it playing with the moonlight on the surface of the sea. I was enchanted.

Other people who have visited Fournoi have told me they were not as charmed. They complained of a lack of things to do, of nightlife, of places to visit, and of the wind. To them it was a bunch of small islands in the middle of a greater sea, which offered solitude and beauty perhaps, but not much else. But it was a place of greater significance in the past not for what little remains on the land, but because of the meltemi, and what still lies beneath the waves.

The Ikarian Sea – Fournoi lies smack bang in the middle – was known as far back as Homer’s time as a notoriously dangerous place. On the way to and from important ancient cities such as Claros, Colophon, Ephesus, Miletus, Samos and Teos, and of the twelve cities of the Ionian League, Fournoi was a days sailing from nine of them. Anyone going north or south in this area – or coming or going to the Cyclades, Attika or beyond – would pass by Fournoi.

As Peter B Campbell and George Koutsouflakis relate in Aegean Navigation and the Shipwrecks of Fournoi, the evidence found on the seabed around the archipelago points to its value as an anchorage. The content of the wrecks, and their origin, point to a trading system not only within the Aegean, but the Mediterranean as a whole, going back to before the glory – and the self-inflicted demise – of the Athenian League.

The shipwrecks of Fournoi do not contain treasure troves of gold and silver but everyday cargoes to be bought and sold at markets far distant from their manufacture: ceramics and other tableware, glass, tiles and bricks, stone. And the wrecks show that these cargoes were en route  rather than meant for Fournoi itself, Fournoi providing anchorages and shelter.

And as always, trade routes attracted pirates and other malign actors, preying on ships and passengers alike. In later times, corsairs travelled annually from as far afield as France, Italy, Malta and Sardinia to hunt there; English buccaneers were not averse to the spoils there either. The Fournoi Pass – that stretch of water to the north of Fournoi, in between Ikaria and Samos, was the safest place to pass up and down that part of the coast, weather and pirates permitting.

So why, in the survey described by Campbell and Koutsouflakis, were so many shipwrecks found in this purportedly safe place of refuge? It turns out that this is not a function of the treacherous waters surrounding the archipelago – or of the piracy at unsettled periods of Aegean life – but of the sheer high volume of traffic passing through. There were no settlements of significant size on the islands themselves to warrant this traffic.

Neither are there many historical references – ancient or modern – that refer to Fournoi. Most of them are all – as it were – in passing. But this is the point perhaps: Fournoi was so important for so long simply because it was the gateway – northbound, eastbound as well as west and southbound – to other places. It was not a trading hub, but a navigational hub, and as in all maritime activity, its disasters left their mark for us to find.

In March of this year, the US Federal Maritime Commission – out of nowhere it seemed – launched an examination of global maritime chokepoints, namely the Northern Sea Passage, the English Channel, the Malacca Strait, the Singapore Strait, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Panama Canal, and the Suez Canal. The point of the investigation was to see whether “constraints in global maritime chokepoints had created unfavourable shipping conditions caused by the laws, regulations or practices of foreign (i.e. non-US) governments or the practices of foreign-flag vessel owners or operators.” Whatever that means.

The omissions from the list of chokepoints – the Danish Strait, the Bosphorus, the Taiwan Strait, the Torres Strait – to name a few off the top of my head, were as surprising to me as was the inclusion of the English Channel; they seemed arbitrary, and an excuse for some yet unrevealed nonsense idea. Why nonsense? Because – with the exception of the Suez and Panama canals – they have always been there. Chokepoints did not suddenly arise out of the sea to thwart America’s right to become a global sea power again.

Fournoi is not even a chokepoint in the East Aegean anymore because the technology to overcome geographical hazards – in this case the gradual change from sail to steam, and beyond – meant that you didn’t have to wait for the weather: you just went through it, just like my ferry did. It is human activity – like the grounding of Ever Given, like the destructive activities of the Houthi rebels (and the causes of their rebellious activities), like the changes in the geopolitical weather everywhere – that is far more significant to trade than the ever-present geological and geographical facts on the ground, and in the sea around.

Perhaps I am placing too much emphasis on chokepoints, obstacles, waypoints, points of transition and transfer, waiting or struggling until we pass from one place, one phase to another. These places exist, necessarily so, existentially so, and we cannot do much about them. They attract danger – danger in the form of malign actors, or even sirens singing us to shipwreck – because we attract them, we are more obvious to them. But in turn we are attracted to them, sometimes disastrously, and there, beneath the waves – existing but out of sight – lie the casualties and wrecks of our own passage through life.

There is something poignant about the shipwrecks of Fournoi – over 50 detected from before 700 BCE until the turn of the twentieth century – that draws me back to the archipelago even though (or maybe simply because) I was unaware of them during my last visit. They are there because of Fournoi’s suitability as a safe anchorage, as a pause in a passage from one place to the other, places that were – necessarily, existentially – more important than the place of refuge en route:the port of loading, the port of discharge.

Cavafy wrote of the return to Ithaki as not being the point of the voyage, but rather the wisdom gained on the voyage. The poem has always bothered me slightly, if only because he assumes that there is actually a destination in mind at all. Whether from professional experience or temperament,  I know different: a ship loads, sails, discharges, sails and then loads again; there is no final destination. The harbours, the ports, the chokepoints, the voyage, even the places of supposed refuge carry risks and dangers, as well as beauty, experience and wisdom. Better to keep moving: the meltemi will always be there to sing along.  

Simon Ward