Stavros Niarchos was born 117 years ago today, on July 3, 1909, in Piraeus, and went on to build one of the most powerfu...

Stavros Niarchos was born 117 years ago today, on July 3, 1909, in Piraeus, and went on to build one of the most powerful shipping empires of the 20th century. His start was anything but privileged. His father Spyros, a farmer from Vamvakou in Laconia, had emigrated to America, returned with 100,000 drachmas, and partnered with the Koumantaros brothers to run a flour mill. When the elder Niarchos lost everything on the stock exchange in 1923, Stavros had to leave private school for public school and eventually dropped out of law school to work as a clerk at his uncles' mill. That mill job turned out to be his first real break. He secretly founded a transport company with borrowed money, convinced his uncles it was cheaper to use a single carrier for their flour shipments, and won the contract without them ever knowing he owned it. The experience taught him something he never forgot: the real money was not in producing goods but in moving them. In 1938, he made his move into shipping, buying an old cargo vessel called the Maleas with borrowed money and insuring it for ten times its value. When German forces sank it during World War Two, he collected the insurance payout and bought four ships. After the war, he acquired 16 Liberty ships from the United States at favorable terms, and by 1957 he had a fleet of 70 vessels. The postwar oil boom pushed him into tankers, and by 1962 sources close to him said his fleet was roughly equal to half of France's entire merchant navy. In 1950 he appeared on the cover of Time magazine and purchased Spetsopoula, the small Saronic island that would become his private retreat for the rest of his life. A 1996 tribute in Oikonomikos Tachydromos described him as one of the last self-made titans who rose through hardship and war using nothing but brains and nerve, and who put Greek shipping on the world map at a moment when Greece needed exactly that. #StavrosNiarchos #GreekShipping #GreekHistory