Hellas Syria Express Line
Arie Amaya-Akkermans
“However, discontinuity is not identical with cessation; ruptured time becomes metastasized with the unfinished edges of the present.”
Vangelis Vlahos, research photos from The Bridge project, 2015
The first announcement came in the spring of 2019: Ferry boat services between the touristic district of Çeșme, on the Aegean province of Izmir in Western Turkey, and the Greek coastal town of Lavrion, near Athens, would commence on June 2, according to Aegean Seaways, the Turkish company that would run the services. Although there exist regular ferry and hydrofoil services between the Greek islands in the Dodecanese, the North Aegean and the Turkish coast, as well as the daily ferries between Çeșme and Chios, Ayvalık and Lesbos, the inauguration of this daily ferry service that would run only through the summer months, signaled the beginning of a new era: Since the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which officially settled a conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Allied Forces dating back to the onset of World War I, there have been no maritime links between the Greek and Turkish mainland. Several attempts to negotiate the establishment of a passenger route between both countries remained inconclusive, until an agreement was finally brokered in 2019.
The idea behind the daily ferry between Çeșme and Lavrion wasn’t only to provide transportation for passengers and their cars, but also for cargo-carrying vehicles, in order to boost the region’s economy. On Sunday June 30 of the same year, with a delay of almost a month in the schedule, the first ferry departed at 5:30 pm, marked by a ceremony in the port of Çeșme, where an Ottoman military band concert and folk dances saw the Aegean Seaways ferry off on its first voyage. The vessel would be able to carry 360 passengers, 500 cars and 90 trucks. During the 7 hour journey, the voyagers would have at their disposal restaurants, cafes, children’s playrooms and duty-free shops.
Vangelis Vlahos, Foreign archaeologists from standing to bending position, 2012, 53 framed photos on a wall mounted shelf, installation view from the exhibition “Current Pasts” at the National Museum for Contemporary Art, Athens, 2012
But the long-awaited journey soon became shrouded in vagueness: In the summer of 2019, it was near impossible to book a place in the ferry due to the inconsistent departure dates and the name of the vessel was unknown. According to a travel forum online, the images from the ferry posted on Aegean Seaways’ website were collated from different ferries: The cabin corridor was from the Stena Vision (Swedish), the shop was from the Ionian Sky (Cypriot, not in service since 2013), the restaurant was from the Benchijigua Express (Spanish), the self-service was from Danish operator Maersk, and the stern view was from the Peter Hektorovič (Croatian). And then the shelf life of this ambitious, geopolitically charged, transportation venture would be cut very short. It quickly vanished without an official announcement, the website disappeared, and though it is not exactly known for how long it ran, it’s said somewhere that the company ceased all operations after 7 weeks. Did Aegean Seaways even exist? Press images showed what looked like a repurposed ex-Soviet cargo ferry.
And yet this wasn’t the first time that a ferry line constituted an ambitious geopolitical project to connect mainland Greece with the broader Middle East. In the fall of 2019, the group exhibition “When the Present is History”, curated by Daphne Vitali, opened in Istanbul at DEPO, dealing with the way in which artists have treated historical accounts, largely based on documentary material from their own countries, in order to re-narrate them as events interlinked with the condition of the present. As a part of the exhibition, including a number of Greek artists—among other geographies, the archival project “The Bridge” (2013-2015), by Vangelis Vlahos, recreates through photographs found in newspaper archives, online or in private photo albums, a fictional journey between the Thessalian city of Volos, about 300 km northeast of Athens, and Tartus, the second largest port city in Syria.
Vangelis Vlahos, The Bridge, 2015, 106 photos on a wall mounted shelf, courtesy of the artist, MOMus Thessaloniki
“The Bridge” refers to a trade agreement between Greece and Syria in the 1970s and 1980s, which led to the establishment of a direct ferry service between the two ports, connecting Europe to the Arab world, and considered a fundamental pathway for transporting commercial goods to the region. The most remarkable aspect of this agreement is that for a country like Greece, home to one of the largest and oldest ports in Europe, its maritime connections to the Eastern Mediterranean have been scant in the modern era. The ongoing Aegean dispute with Turkey, permanently handicaped Greece as a trading partner with its surrounding region, paradoxical for a country whose fortunes have been built on shipping empires.
The ferry link surveyed by Vlahos in his project, operated between 1977 and 1988, and was eventually discontinued due to the unstable situation in the Middle East, closing a window of opportunity for Greece to be a regional player. The larger economic motivation for the project was reducing costs for companies transferring products to the Middle East via rigs, in the same way that Aegean Seaways aimed to provide an easy route from Izmir for rigs to enter Europe.
The Middle East of this era is already engulfed by turmoil: The Civil War in Lebanon continued on different fronts —the country being occupied by both Syria and Israel, the Iraq-Iran war lasted almost an entire decade; at first Jordan was supportive of Syria’s occupation of Lebanon but later both countries broke relations after Jordan supported Egyptian president Sadat’s peace initiative with Israel, and the First Palestinian Intifada loomed in the horizon.
Greece in the 1970s, on the other hand, wasn't anything like a postcard of European stability: The country witnessed the abolition of the monarchy, the end of the Regime of the Colonels, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, and the establishment of the Third Hellenic Republic. At the same time, during the preceding decade, Greece also became a popular destination for the wealthy with up-market destinations such as Mykonos and Santorini, far away from the troubles of the capital, advertised in full color brochures and on the travel pages of international newspapers. Similarly, an archival video produced by the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation in 1977, advertised the Falster ferry, which launched the line connecting Volos to Tartus, showing cargo trucks loading on the ship, set to festive music, alongside the Acropolis, enchanting views of the center of Athens—clean from demonstrations, and other touristic landmarks.
Amidst this sense of confusion and historical mismatch, the found images in “The Bridge”, portray everyday life on the ferry, amateur snapshots taken by traveling truckers and the ship crew, sunbathing in the open sea, or vistas of the seascape and the silhouette of the places the ferry was passing by. These ordinary images are placed next to each other, on top of a very long wall-mounted shelf, following rather loosely the original route of the ferry, in the direction of Volos to Tartus.
Yet it seems as if this temporal narrative, carefully constructed by the artist, would contain traces of a present about to become dissolved, or already undergoing dissolution: One iconic black and white image among the 102 photographs in “The Bridge”, that of the Hellas vessel, property of the Hellas Syria Express Line, became once the subject of historical controversy, among sailors who undertook the journey on the Falster ship. Twelve years ago, on a Greek online forum, a discussion began concerning an article that appeared in a Macedonian newspaper in 1979 (I wasn’t able to trace the article in question), mentioning the famous Volos-Tartus line and the Falster, a ferry that can carry 70 trucks, 60 passenger cars and 100 passenger, departing every 4 days for a journey lasting about 40 hours. But at the end of the article, apparently there’s a mention of the Hellas, which nobody seemed to recognize. Was it a ghost like the unnamed vessel of Aegean Seaways?
What unfolds is an intricate account of ships from different companies, changing names and owners—a frequent occurrence in the trade, leaving two possible candidates: The Stena Nordica and the Stena Runner. Other ships, the Argo or the Alpha Enterprise might have traveled as a ferry named the Syria, also under the Hellas Syria Express Line. What is remarkable here is not the different names and charters, but the fact that these ferries were chartered to Hellas Syria Express Line only intermittently, and in between other charters around the world. Hellas Ferry was acquired by Townsend Thoresen European Ferries in 1986, becoming Doric Ferry, and the line between Volos and Tartus would cease to exist shortly afterwards. The opaque route of the vessels goes on to show the unstable political geography of the period.
A fascinating account by a British trucker, from the 1980s, gives a vivid picture of the geopolitical ruptures. A simple enough looking load, to be delivered between Damascus, Amman and Doha, became a 3-month long adventure: “This was when I used the Volos-Tartus ferry as often as I could to avoid Turkey, but politics got in the way before I got to Volos. Syria would not let me in to unload in Damascus with a Jordanian load on board! Something kicked off between countries way after I left London”. After the realization that the errand wasn’t going anywhere, and a return to the UK wouldn’t be possible at that point, he set for Athens.
In the Greek capital, a fixer could arrange for him a ferry to Cyprus, and from there, another one to Lebanon. A Lebanese truck would load a shipment off to Syria, and then he would be able to continue on to Jordan, although driving through Syria (strangely enough possible only without unloading in Damascus). The problem was getting a Lebanese visa, which for some reason could not be obtained in Greece, but perhaps in Cyprus. The trucker got on a ferry bound for Larnaca, even though his destination was in fact Limassol and once in Cyprus, he wasn’t allowed to drive. Then a taxi to the Lebanese embassy in Lefkosa revealed the partition lines between north and south in Cyprus, which would put the journey on hold for 3 days more. On the next ferry, 40 km off the coast of Beirut, it seemed that there was a big fire somewhere, which upon arrival turned out to be spreading on most of the docks. But it wasn’t just a fire. It was a civil war. And after 3 days of curfew, finally departing for Syria: “2 or 3 hours later into Damascus and back to reality. A month and a bit and I hadn’t yet reached my tip in Amman.”
Vangelis Vlahos, The Bridge, 2015, 106 photos on a wall mounted shelf, courtesy of the artist
Against the background of these chronicles of interruption, intermittency and discontinuity, “The Bridge” gives us access to latency, or the state of something being present and yet not fully manifest. In this semi-linear layout, unfolding in appearance seamlessly, in a single direction, it is through the historiographical gaps that we become aware of the relationship between documents of the past and the tautology of the contemporary archive—we’re unable to secure the direction and durability of time. None of the documents included in Vlahos’ fictional journey were intended as building blocks of historical continuity or did so only perfunctorily, but in their composite arrangement they historicize instead, a break in time. However, discontinuity is not identical with cessation; ruptured time becomes metastasized with the unfinished edges of the present.
Only a few months prior to the Istanbul exhibition, the casual itinerary of the carefree passengers of the Hellas in 1970-something, could have been exactly reconstructed frame by frame, in the opposite direction, from Çeșme to Lavrion, aboard an unnamed ghost vessel, apparently constructed photographically from other different vessels—a strategy not unfamiliar to Vlahos. How and when do ordinary documents of the present become truly history? The presence in Istanbul of the long mounted shelves with photographs coincides almost by juxtaposition, with the sudden disappearance of Aegean Seaways. But the contemporary present, completely liquefied, in spite of its entropy of data and images, has become so resistant to the archive. The many photographs taken aboard the ghost ship in the summer of 2019 will likely never be found in newspapers or photo albums. They have already disappeared into dead Facebook accounts or anonymous Instagram feeds.
A photograph is here only a document that, torn apart from its own narrative environment, becomes a muted fragment, in the same way that an artifact forcibly removed from an archaeological site loses its place in complex networks of meaning and provenience. From that point onward, narratives that reconstruct events of the past are always at risk of percolating into a viscous substance in which the present and the past become isolated, atemporal events, in a mutual relation of reciprocity and causality that does not leave space for historical change. I’m going to borrow here an idea from Walter Seidl’s writing on “The Bridge”: What if different forms of historical rupture or failure could reactivate each other by means of confrontation in the here-and-now?
Underneath the surface of the clean waters of the Aegean—imagine the beauty of a clear summer day departing by ferry from Çeșme, interminable historical failures lie surreptitiously hidden: The Mediterranean Sea as the largest graveyard on earth for migrants, the lack of Western support for the EastMed Pipeline, the long dispute with Turkey over Greece’s Exclusive Economic Zone, or the infamous Moria refugee camp in nearby Lesbos. But as we know now, taking a glimpse backward at the political events underlying “The Bridge” and conspicuously absent from the photographs, these failures or ruptures are latent, and might reawaken at any time, swallowing the whole of reality.
Vangelis Vlahos, research photos from The Bridge project, 2015
By the time the archival photograph of the elusive Hellas, along with the rest of the project, traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, for the second iteration of Vitali’s exhibition, in the spring of 2021, the prescience of the relationship between the physical archive of the Hellas Syria Express Line, and the nonexistent but potentially real, archive of the Aegean Seaways, is concentrated on another historical failure, unpredictably turned global condition. Not long after the summer of 2019 and the Istanbul exhibition, the Covid19 pandemic closed down Greece’s ports, and all physical links connecting Greece and Turkey—this time not only by sea, disappeared once again.
In “The Bridge”, Vangelis Vlahos articulates a fragmentary account of this porous past-present continuum, neither with the historiographical precision of a vertical archive, nor with the uncanny of a storyteller attempting to excavate hidden stratigraphies in the text of the world. He remains at the surface of the event, always between visible facts but in the absence of a master narrative. This reconstruction of the past is not necessarily from the perspective of the present, but performed as if the past was the present—there is no way for us to know which documents become history or not.
As a crypto-colonial state, Greece’s perennially delayed or discontinued geopolitical projects make us aware of historical rupture not as accident but as structure of power: The many identities of Greece—Western democracy, European state, surrogate heir to an ancient civilization, chronic debtor, border policeman, holiday paradise, ideological battlefield, “Middle Eastern”, are conveyed (or withdrawn) by the Western gaze, in a process that resembles the colonial surveys of classical archaeologists in the country since the 19th century. Vlahos’ earlier project, “Foreign Archaeologists From Standing to Bending Position” (2012), highlights the constant state of scrutiny of the country by Western experts: 53 portraits of foreign archaeologists who have worked on the field in Greece since 1950, discovered in the archives of the foreign schools of archaeology based in Athens, draw attention to the archaeological task—measuring, examining and surveying objects of study. In the flow of the images, reflecting physical positions, from standing erect, to bending down to standing again, a fragmentary archive, once again, collated from different sources and streamlined as a fictional (dis)continuum, treats the documents of the past as a knot in the socio-political conditions of the present.
A relationship between archaeology and photography creates here an enlarged context for “The Bridge”: Archaeologists produce neutral time through photography by means of editing out timestamps and contemporary objects from photographs of excavations and artifacts, in order to create the modern illusion of an untouched remote past, which nevertheless has been violently excavated in order to be represented. In his treatment of the archival document, Vangelis Vlahos turns this process of neutral representation upside down, working entirely on found materials—where editing is impossible, not by removing traces of conflict and violence in the narrative, but by resisting the temptation of producing documentary linearity. In this open-ended discontinuity, the traces of the past, however absent, remain in latency, ready to return on short notice. The present tension and tenseness of these photographs in their spatial arrangement is not a reenactment of by-gone events, but rather of the condition of unfinished time: The same present, then and now, continues erratically, spilling out in all directions.
Arie Amaya-Akkermans is a writer and researcher based in Istanbul, he writes about contemporary art, archaeology and the history of minorities in the Middle East. His current research deals with the Greek heritage of Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean. Arie's writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, Canvas, Art Asia Pacific and Harper's Bazaar Art Arabia & SENTENTIAE ANTIQUAE.