Boatbuilding on Syros

Introduction

A living traditional craft, wooden boatbuilding has been practised on Syros for millennia; the first known engravings of Aegean ships, made in the ancient settlement of Chalandriani on the island’s northern edge, can be traced to the second Phase of Early Cycladic history (2800-2300 BC). In more recent times, the impressive development of shipping and boatbuilding activity can be traced to a series of historical events around the time of the Greek revolution. As historian Apostolos Delis states in his detailed study on wooden boatbuilding in Syros, “From its founding up until the 1880s, Hermoupolis of Syros was the most important shipping and boatbuilding hub for sailing ships in the Aegean, and likely the eastern Mediterranean.” Over the course of the twentieth century, the advent of steamship technology proved fateful for Syros shipyards, which by and large continued to specialize in the construction of wooden sailing ships. Nevertheless, boatbuilders continued to maintain the tradition and remained renowned for their craftsmanship.

Today, six active traditional boatyards and maintenance yards exist; threatened by a sharp decline in demand for new wooden boats and EU directives leading to a reduction of the existing traditional fleet, these establishments have turned increasingly to maintenance and repair of vessels used for touristic, fishing and leisure purposes.

Aiming to preserve and celebrate this unique form of intangible cultural heritage, Archipelago Network presents three levels of documentation grounded in a common archival and research methodology: first, the digitization and cataloguing of audiovisual materials related to traditional boatbuilding heritage, including photographs, sketches, general arrangement plans and other ephemera sourced from boatyards, maintenance yards, and family archives; second, creation of video portraits focusing on the boatbuilders active on Syros today; and third, the commissioning of textual and visual essays by two researchers. Architect Iris Lykourioti and anthropologist and boatbuilder Maurizio Borriello were both invited to the island in October 2021 to engage with archival materials and enter into dialogue with the boatbuilders themselves, seeking to express these contemporary manifestations of this vital form of intangible cultural heritage in a wider temporal, economic and geographic context.