BITTER HARVEST
Paul Watkins tells the tragic story of the sponge divers of Kalymnos
Skafandro in Pothia Sponge Shop (© Paul Watkins)
The tremulous strains of a violin accompany the dancer, a moustachioed middle-aged man in a black costume and sea captain’s cap. He holds a cane in his right hand and jabs it at the floor for support. Two fellow dancers, arms linked and swaying to the music, watch him anxiously. At the point of falling the man clings to his stick but gradually slips to the floor. He grabs at his inert legs, but to no avail. Then miraculously, he gets back on his feet, discards his stick and joins the others in a lively continuation of the dance.
This is the mihanikos (‘mechanic’, ‘machine-man’), a Greek folk dance akin to the syrtos, portraying a sponge diver stricken by the ‘bends’. Instead of imitating the action of daily tasks (sowing seeds, casting nets), as seen in the mimicry of other solo dancers, this man is depicting the sad aftermath of his occupation. He is a victim of the skafandro, the notorious diving suit introduced to Kalymnos and other sponge-fishing islands of the Dodecanese in the 1860s.
The purpose of this suit, with its large bronze helmet attached to a hose supplying compressed air to the diver, was to increase the yield of sponges gathered from the sea bed. Equipped with this apparatus, the diver could stay submerged for lengthy periods – but his productivity was offset by the dangers involved in returning to the surface.
From depths of up to 50 metres it was essential that the diver maintained a gradual, measured ascent to the boat to control the effect of the decompression of air feeding into his pipeline. If he rose too quickly, the rapid change could cause the nitrogen in his bloodstream to form bubbles, with fatal or life-changing consequences.
Every year during the peak period of the sponge fishing industry, when up to 300 boats sailed from Kalymnos with up to 15 divers on board, the casualty rate from death and paralysis would be measured in the hundreds. In the long months of the fleet’s absence, the men’s families would prepare for the worst, many of the married women donning black shawls as they hastened to the harbour to greet the vessels’ return.
Now the industry which once dominated the island’s economy has gone, its memory preserved only by the sponge-sellers’ stores on the waterfront of the Kalymnian port, Pothia. These were the old ‘sponge factories’ which used to trim and clean the sponges for market as a Greek speciality. They now have only a guarded reply to the question, “Where are the sponges from?” The usual answer – “The Caribbean” – need not be revealed to the grateful recipient of the sponge, who will be enjoying visions of the sun-kissed seas of the Aegean as they soap themselves in their bath.
As old as the waves
Observing the sponge diver with his sickle-shaped knife poised at the prow of a boat on an early 5th-century BC Greek vase, one can only guess at the antiquity of his skills. What is clear from this scene, however, is that in ancient times the diver plunged naked into the ocean, as he continued to do until the introduction of the diving suit in the mid 19th century.
Paintings and photos in Pothia’s Nautical Museum depicting the view above and below the surface show the simplicity of the operation. On the order of the captain, who uses a glass-bottomed cylinder to look for sponges on the seabed, a naked diver plunges overboard clinging to a heavy, flat stone (skandalopetra) attached by a line to the boat. This weight carries him rapidly to the bottom, a maximum depth of 30 metres, where he can remain for as long as he can hold his breath (3-5 minutes). In this time, he gathers as many sponges as he can find, cutting them from the rocky seabed and putting them in a bag hanging from his neck. A tug on the line is the signal to his comrades to haul him back up.
The suited diver would use the same method to retrieve the sponges, including the use of the stone to assist his descent. His advantage over his unencumbered predecessor was that he could remain at depths of up to 150 metres for as long as 25 minutes, supplied by a compressed air pump on the deck. He would then be winched to the surface by a crew member on the boat, his ascent time measured not by a timepiece but by an old-fashioned klepsydra in the form of an egg-timer.
Later developments in underwater breathing apparatus, introduced between the 1920s and the 1970s, were systems involving an air-feed to a helmet or mask, which made it possible to dispense with the suit. The great pioneer of this method was Jacques Cousteau, who developed an air container (aqualung) which could be carried on the back of the diver (SCUBA, or Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus).
Kalymnian Gold
Although lacking a nervous, digestive or circulatory system – and permanently attached to a single spot on the seabed – the sponge is by all other definitions an animal, with a porous, fibrous body capable of absorbing and filtering water and nutrients through internal channels. Its multiple uses as a cleanser make it a popular gift item for tourists, who may be unaware that its original colour, when seen on the ocean floor, is black. (It is only through cleaning and dyeing that the sponge assumes its attractive golden colour.)
For a rugged island with only 18% cultivation, the sponge industry was indeed ‘gold’ for Kalymnos. The boom period of production, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, saw the growth of numerous companies dedicated to the sponge trade, not only in Kalymnos but in other Greek islands (Symi, Halki) with their own fishing fleets. Agencies were also set up in other areas with a local industry, such as the Levant and the Bahamas and, most famously, Tarpon Springs, Florida.
The most successful Kalymnian trader was undoubtedly Nikolaos Vouvalis, whose main offices were in Pothia and St Mary Axe, London. His personal wealth, generated by the continuing success of the business, opened doors to British society, including the court of Queen Victoria. His splendid mansion, set in an orange grove on the hilly outskirts of Pothia, was left to the state by his widow and turned into a museum of his collection of art and antiquities: this has recently transferred to a new building nearby which is the core of the town’s splendid new Archaeological Museum.
A tarnished legacy
Various factors determined the fate of the sponge industry. In the 1960s and 70s, countries such as Egypt and Libya, which had formerly permitted fishing off their coasts, excluded Greek sponge-divers from their territorial waters, confining the Greeks to the international limits of the Mediterranean. The 1950s saw the first competition from synthetic sponges, and in the 1980s and beyond, unexplained diseases and freak warm currents took their toll. Gradually the sponge fishing fleet diminished and the island’s economy became more dependent on tourism.
Memories also diminished, but today the older inhabitants of Pothia will share a precious vision of the departure of the fleet from the harbour, usually taking place in the week after Easter. A priest holding an icon of St Nicholas, patron saint of fishermen, would bless each boat with a sprinkling of holy water, and the assembled population would join in the prayers for a successful voyage and a safe return.
The fishermen themselves might still be recovering from a hearty and emotional taverna dinner the night before, in which they would pledge their love to their wives and sweethearts – a meaningful farewell as they would be away in far distant fishing grounds for at least six months until their return in the winter. Many of the divers were young men whose fathers might have succumbed to the deadly ‘bends’ and who were now exposing themselves to a similar fate: a distressing prospect for their already bereaved mothers who increasingly became members of a community of women in mourning, children and the disabled.
The return of the fleet would be an even more emotional event for the people of Kalymnos. Church bells would ring at the first sighting of the sponge-laden boats and the people would run to the harbour. Many of the divers would have perished on the voyage. Their graves, lost forever to the bereaved, would have been at sea or on a remote foreign shore.
Kalymnos has assuredly paid the price for that little piece of luxury in our bathtubs. But apart from the loss of their loved ones and the memories of the long months of hardship exposed to the uncertainties and dangers of the elements and the ocean depths, the Kalymnians themselves bear no grudges for their sacrifice, strengthened by the bonds of an island community and its courageous survival.
Further reading
See F. Warn’s Bitter Sea (Guardian Angel, 2000) and H. Russell Bernard’s Kalymnian Sponge Diving (University of Illinois, 1967). A useful study of the multiple references to sponges in ancient literature, from Homer to Aristotle, may be found in the paper ‘Sponges: an historical survey of their knowledge in Greek antiquity’ by E. Voultsiadou, Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 87, No. 6, December 2007.
