This post is part of the series “Gender and Atlantic Ocean Environments,” co-edited with Written in the Waves journal, for their special issue Soil and Sea.
On August 15, 1925, Elias Kulukundis wrote from London to his sister Marigo. He began by describing a diabetic wound and the new treatment with insulin. He confessed: “I am not at all certain that it will heal, and for this reason I am writing to you now, while I still can.”1 The letter then shifted from his body to the family’s steamships. The Atlanticos was expected at Dunkirk; the Atlantis was loading at East London, South Africa, but “the loading will be delayed, perhaps because the cargo is not yet dry enough to permit it.”2 Illness, moisture, cargo, telegraphy, and distance converged.
Greek shipping depended not only on ships, chartering offices, freight rates, and commercial expertise, but also on letters, kinship, investment, care, and the work of making uncertainty intelligible. The ocean was not an empty interval between ports. Weather, water, fuel, disease, and irregular communication shaped commercial decisions and family life alike. This essay examines a collection of early twentieth-century correspondence produced by the Kulukundis family, shipowners from the island of Kasos. Reading the letters as environmental and gendered sources allows us to see the Atlantic not as a backdrop to the family story, but as part of its fabric.
Kasos lies at the south-eastern edge of the Aegean, between Crete and Karpathos, near the coast of Asia Minor and the routes towards Egypt. Although small, rocky, and resource-limited, the island developed a maritime community. From the late eighteenth century, Kasiot captains and shipowners entered long-distance trade in the Mediterranean and Black Sea. During the nineteenth century, island families moved through Syros, Piraeus, Port Said, and northern European ports, carrying with them capital, professional knowledge, and relationships of trust.[3]
The island’s environment did not simply “create” sailors, but it made mobility, coastal exchange, and access to maritime networks central to local life. Kasos was both connected and exposed: ships opened routes to distant markets, while rough seas, seasonal schedules, and unreliable communications could leave islanders isolated. This tension between mobility and remoteness persisted even after Greek shipowners adopted steam. Within this setting, the Kulukundis family expanded from a Kasiot maritime household into an international shipping group.
The family’s second generation comprised Elias, Nikolaos, Ioannis, Marigo, and Anna — the children of Georgios Kulukundis. Elias G. Kulukundis, born in 1858, became a shipowner whose sons and other relatives built a group of shipping companies managed from Piraeus and London. The family’s interwar enterprise expanded through kinship, co-ownership, and alliances with other Kasiot maritime families, including the Rethymnis and Mavroleon families. Its vessels crossed the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, carrying coal, grain, groundnuts, and other bulk cargoes between northern Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia.[4]
The family’s rise formed part of a transformation in Greek-owned shipping. During the nineteenth century, sailing vessels from island communities carried grain and other bulk cargoes between the Black Sea, the eastern Mediterranean, and western European markets. From the 1890s onwards, steamships required larger investments, access to coal, specialist repairs, insurance, brokerage, and a flow of commercial intelligence. London became important because it placed Greek shipowners close to the Baltic Exchange, Lloyd’s, banks, brokers, and charterers. The transition from sail to steam did not dissolve the family firm. Instead, kinship capital was reorganized through joint-stock companies and overseas management offices.[5]
Before the Piraeus-based Atlanticos S.A. was established in 1928, the family was associated with the English company Atlanticos Co. Ltd. and with the steamships Atlanticos and Atlantis. The next generation expanded the fleet through companies managed from London. Tramp steamers followed cargo opportunities rather than fixed passenger schedules, moving from one port to another. Profits depended on timely information about freight rates, harvests, coal, repairs, and political conditions. In such a business, correspondence was not merely a record of family intimacy. It constituted an infrastructure through which dispersed capital and risk could be understood.[6]
The family archive, now preserved at the General State Archives in Ermoupolis, contains approximately 1,500 letters in 1,349 folders, dating from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Its value lies in the way it crosses the boundary between the personal and the commercial. A single letter might shift from diabetes to freight rates, from a child’s education to a ship’s route, or from a marriage to an international political crisis. For a maritime family, these categories were not discrete. Kinship fostered trust; trust underpinned credit and investment; information enabled decisions about ships, cargoes, and routes.[7]
The correspondence also unsettles any seamless account of global connection: ships, postal routes, and telegraphy shaped the speed, form, and meaning of communication. News that a vessel had reached a coaling station could reassure relatives by temporarily confirming the location of a mobile person in space. A delayed telegram, a missed steamer, or an absent letter reopened uncertainty.[8]
Most of the surviving letters in the collection were addressed to Marigo Georgiou Kulukundis, later Marigo Minacoulis-Kulukundis, while she divided her time between Kasos and Syros. Marigo was born in 1871 and was a member of the family’s second generation. She married Minas Minacoulis, a doctor and merchant associated with Kasos, Smyrna, and the coast of Asia Minor. She invested her personal property in the family’s shipping enterprises, and company records indicate she held between 1,500 and 3,000 shares in Atlanticos S.A.; in one record, she appears as the largest individual shareholder listed. She was neither a director nor a ship manager, and the evidence does not warrant recasting her as a hidden executive. Her significance lay elsewhere: at the intersection of capital, senior kinship status, and access to commercial information.[9]
Marigo’s correspondents included her siblings, her sister-in-law Eleni Mavroleon-Kulukundis, nephews, merchants, and representatives of associations in Port Said and Syros. From 1918 to 1926, Elias wrote to her roughly every two weeks, reporting on freight markets, vessel movements, purchases, routes, politics, illness, and family obligations. The regularity and substance of these letters show that she was not merely a recipient of affectionate news. She was a shareholder, a trusted elder, and a stable point of connection in a family whose men, ships, and offices were dispersed across several seas. Taken together, these patterns place Marigo within a broader history of maritime family capitalism, in which women often became visible through shares, inheritance, correspondence, household property, and trusted communication rather than through formal management records. The point is not to recast Marigo as a manager she was not, but to recognize forms of economic presence that formal business records routinely obscure. Her archive thus reveals how women shaped both the ownership and the communication of maritime risk across generations and oceans.[10]
Marine environmental historians have urged scholars to historicize the ocean—to treat it as a changing environment that enabled human action while imposing material limits upon it. The Kulukundis’ letters make this perspective tangible.[11] On January 30, 1926, Elias reported that severe storms had swept the North Atlantic for fifteen days, damaging steamships and killing crew members. His brother Nikolaos was travelling from Buenos Aires towards Hamburg, and Elias feared for his safety. Weather entered the family letter as risk, bereavement, and anxious waiting.[12]
A letter from December 1924 records a still more complex chain of disruption. The Atlantis, carrying coal from Barry Docks towards the Río de la Plata, encountered severe weather and south-westerly winds. The Atlanticos, sailing from New Orleans towards London, faced a different danger when a crewman fell ill, and a port doctor suspected bubonic plague. The vessel was disinfected, its loading was obstructed, and it lost time, resulting in additional expenses that turned an anticipated profit into a loss-making voyage. Ports, therefore, were not merely gateways for trade. They also operated as biological borders where bodies, cargoes, and vessels could be inspected, isolated, and delayed.[13]
In August 1925, Elias suggested that loading at East London, South Africa, might be delayed because the grain was not sufficiently dry. Long voyages required repeated coaling stops, and fuel consumption could erode already narrow returns. Steamships promised speed and regularity, yet their movement remained materially contingent on dry cargo, available coal, workable harbours, healthy crews, and navigable weather. This was environmental precarity: steam technology did not conquer the sea; it operated within unstable atmospheric, biological, and coastal conditions.[14]
Commercial uncertainty was inseparable from these material constraints. In October 1923, during a severe shipping depression, Elias wrote to Marigo: “We do not know where to direct the ships—not to make a profit, but to lose less.”[15] Freight markets shaped these decisions, but harvests, port conditions, fuel supplies, quarantine rules, and the physical state of cargoes conditioned the markets themselves. Environmental history is therefore not a supplementary layer placed over economic history. It reveals how the economy, technology, human bodies, and the ocean were entangled.
Marigo and Eleni appear in the correspondence not as passive figures waiting ashore, but as correspondents, organizers, and mediators. Marigo received and circulated information, held capital, and supervised family property on Kasos. Eleni coordinated purchases, journeys, parcels, and care across several households. Their work sustained the network in ways that company accounts failed to record.
A 1913 letter from Eleni reveals the fragile logistics surrounding an ordinary object. A seamstress delivered Marigo’s dress too late for it to be placed aboard a caique, a small local vessel. The captain might pass through Piraeus again, but the parcel still required a trustworthy passenger to receive and carry it. In 1910, Eleni sent radishes to Kasos and hoped they would not spoil during the voyage. In another letter, she asked Marigo to collect rent and ensure that gardens and vines were tended. Clothing, perishable food, cultivated land, money, and health circulated through the same maritime infrastructure that moved coal and grain.[16]
The history of emotions helps explain why these practical acts also constituted affective labour. Writing did not merely describe anxiety; it helped organize a response to it. Requests for news, reports of a vessel’s position, instructions concerning houses and gardens, parcels, and blessings translated absence into practical action. The maritime network did not end at the shipping office or the harbour. It extended through domestic spaces and through work that was frequently feminized: preserving correspondence, caring for the sick, managing property, arranging travel, and maintaining relationships during long absences. Women’s labour was not external to maritime enterprise; it formed part of its social and emotional architecture.[17]
The family could track steamships between South America, Africa, Australia, and northern Europe, yet Kasos remained difficult to reach. In December 1925, Elias inferred that winter had reduced the frequency of mail because Marigo’s letters arrived irregularly. In March 1926, after the small steamship service linking the island had been suspended, he lamented: “What a pity that this place is so cut off.”[18] Powerful vessels crossed oceans, but island communication still depended on smaller craft, seasonal schedules, post offices, telegraph stations, and passengers willing to carry letters and parcels.
The Kulukundis correspondence offers more than an intimate supplement to business history. It shows how the Atlantic entered the household through storms, damp cargo, coal consumption, suspected disease, disrupted mail, investment, and waiting. Marigo’s case also brings into view a woman economically embedded in shipping through capital and socially embedded through kinship and correspondence. Greek shipping families participated in the Atlantic world not only through commercial expansion, but also through practices of writing, property management, trust, and care. Their letters reveal the gendered and environmental infrastructures that kept ships and families in motion.
Feature Image: Kasos in the south-eastern Aegean. Kasos in the south-eastern Aegean. Adapted by the author from Conrad Malte-Brun, Carte de la Grèce et de l’Archipel (Paris, 1837). Courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Centre, Stanford Libraries.
[1] General State Archives of Greece, Archives of the Cyclades Prefecture, Syros (GAK/ANK Syros), Elias G. Kulukundis Archive, folder 39, Letter 587, Elias G. Kulukundis to Marigo Minacoulis-Kulukundis, London, August 15, 1925. All translations from the Greek are by the author.
[2] GAK/ANK Syros, Elias G. Kulukundis Archive, folder 39, Letter 587.
[3] Dimitra-Chrysoula Kardakari, The Development of Kasiot Shipping Enterprises from the Local to the Global, from the Nineteenth Century to the Eve of the Second World War (PhD diss., Ionian University, 2025), especially chaps. 1-2.
[4] Kardakari, Development of Kasiot Shipping Enterprises, chaps. 4-6; Gelina Harlaftis, A History of Greek-Owned Shipping: The Making of an International Tramp Fleet, 1830 to the Present Day (London: Routledge, 1996).
[5] Harlaftis, History of Greek-Owned Shipping.
[6] Kardakari, Development of Kasiot Shipping Enterprises, chaps. 5-6; Harlaftis, History of Greek-Owned Shipping; Roland Wenzlhuemer, “The Ship, the Media, and the World: Conceptualizing Connections in Global History,” Journal of Global History 11 (2016): 163-186.
[7] General State Archives of Greece, Archives of the Cyclades Prefecture, Syros (GAK/ANK Syros), Elias G. Kulukundis Archive, collection description.
[8] For the conceptual framing, see Wenzlhuemer, “Ship, Media, and World.” For the examples from the Kulukundis correspondence, see GAK/ANK Syros, Elias G. Kulukundis Archive, folder 39, Letter 587, London, August 15, 1925; Letter 57, London, December 14, 1925; and Letter 590, London, March 28, 1926.
[9] Genealogical Tree of the Kulukundis Family, private collection of Elias Martis Kulukundis; Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece (HA-NBG), Shipping Company Atlanticos S.A., Piraeus, 1928-1958, film 2282, series 34, subseries 16; Dimitra-Chrysoula Kardakari, “Women, Kinship and Maritime Capital in Interwar Greek Shipping: The Case of Marigo Kulukundis,” unpublished manuscript, 2026.
[10] GAK/ANK Syros, Elias G. Kulukundis Archive, folder 39, correspondence addressed to Marigo Minacoulis-Kulukundis, 1918-1927; Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou, “Women and Family Capitalism in Greece, c. 1780-1940,” Business History Review 81, no. 3 (2007): 517-538, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680500036709; and Helen Doe, “Waiting for Her Ship to Come In? The Female Investor in Nineteenth-Century Sailing Vessels,” Economic History Review 63, no. 1 (2010): 85-106.
[11] W. Jeffrey Bolster, “Opportunities in Marine Environmental History,” Environmental History 11, no. 3 (July 2006): 567-597; Helen M. Rozwadowski, “The Promise of Ocean History for Environmental History,” Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (June 2013): 136-139.
[12] GAK/ANK Syros, Elias G. Kulukundis Archive, folder 39, Letter 545, Elias G. Kulukundis to Marigo Minacoulis-Kulukundis, London, January 30, 1926; Gregory Rosenthal, “A Storm in Samoa: An Environmental Microhistory,” Rethinking History 21, no. 1 (2017): 2-27.
[13] GAK/ANK Syros, Elias G. Kulukundis Archive, folder 39, Letter 551, enclosed letter dated London, December 4, 1924.
[14] GAK/ANK Syros, Elias G. Kulukundis Archive, folder 39, Letter 587; Camille Lyans Cole, “Precarious Empires: A Social and Environmental History of Steam Navigation on the Tigris,” Journal of Social History (2016): 74-101, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shw011.
[15] GAK/ANK Syros, Elias G. Kulukundis Archive, Letter 543, Elias G. Kulukundis to Marigo Minacoulis-Kulukundis, Marseille, October 9, 1923, continued at Montpellier, October 11, 1923; Harlaftis, History of Greek-Owned Shipping.
[16] GAK/ANK Syros, Elias G. Kulukundis Archive, Letter 599, Eleni Kulukundis to Marigo Minacoulis-Kulukundis, Syros, May 30, 1913; Letter 601, Syros, November 16, 1910; Letter 614, Syros, March 11, n.y.
[17] Iris van der Zande, “Cramped, Tired, and Painful Hearts: Experiences of Anxiety in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Seafarers’ Wives Letters,” Early Modern Low Countries 9, no. 2 (2025): 349-368; and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, “Fishmongers and Shipowners: Women in Maritime Communities of Early Modern Portugal,” Sixteenth Century Journal 31, no. 1 (2000): 7-23.
[18] GAK/ANK Syros, Elias G. Kulukundis Archive, Letter 57, Elias G. Kulukundis to Marigo Minacoulis-Kulukundis, London, December 14, 1925; Letter 590, London, March 28, 1926; Wenzlhuemer, “Ship, Media, and World”.
