Greek sponge-diving industry is feeling a little ... squeezed
Entering an underwater tunnel 12 hours by boat from the Olympic clamor in Athens, Valsamidis points his well-used scalpel toward the rock face. The 55-year-old sponge diver rips a gelatinous, cantaloupe-sized black creature from its mooring, severs its remaining umbilical cords and deposits the prized "kapadika" sponge from the Dodecanese Islands in a pouch strapped to his weight belt. Behind his face mask, the lifelong sponger's eyes arch into a grin.
There is reason for joy across Kalymnos, the global headquarters of the sponge industry since Homer first raved about the product's absorbent properties in "The Odyssey," almost 3,000 years ago.
The organizers of the 2004 Olympic Games need luxury Greek sponges, and there aren't enough. In the summer of 1986, a sponge plague of unknown origin swept through the Aegean, and marine biologists have yet to find a cure.
"We're giving away over 10,000 Greek sponges to important Olympic guests as a reminder of their visit to our country," says Aristotlis Pavlidis, Greek minister for the Aegean and island policy. "Sadly, the Aegean is not so rich in sponges anymore," rues Pavlidis, 60, whose souvenir gifts are set to scrub scheduled Olympic partygoers such as former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, Prince Albert of Monaco and Coca-Cola CEO E. Neville Isdell.
Absorbed in his work
For Pavlidis, formulating the government's sponge "immigration" policy is serious business. "Recognizing sponges as Greek is critical for the economy of our islands," he says. "Thousands of jobs are at stake."
And a great deal of national pride.
"We believe everyone coming for the games needs at least one natural Greek sponge," Pavlidis says. "Everyone's life would be a lot better off without artificial sponges."
But the millions of synthetic sponges manufactured each year are the least of Pavlidis' diplomatic headaches. The newly appointed minister is negotiating a sponge treaty with Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi that after 18 years of talks could finally allow Greek divers access to the largest known luxury sponge reserves in the world, about 40 renewable tons annually.
And back on Kalymnos, a pork-chop-like chunk of rock that's home for 16,000 people and sponges as big as living-room sofas, islanders say they can meet the Olympic quota, so long as the government remains flexible on what it takes to become a Greek sponge.
The identity crisis began when a bacteria infected Aegean sponge beds, forcing thousands of Kalymnian divers to seek unsullied sponges in the Caribbean, the Philippines and the Gulf of Mexico. Local production plunged from 30 tons in 1986 to 3.5 tons in 1993. This year, sponge analysts say divers on the bone-dry island will be lucky to harvest a little more than a ton from the Aegean and 7 tons from the rest of the Mediterranean Sea.
Yet Athenian merchants continue to tag the immigrant sponges as Greek. The accepted marketing mischief now has the country in a lather about how to explain all this to Olympic visitors. Zinos Bantabanos says he has decided to carry on labeling his 6-year-old shop's 5,000 sponges as Greek stalwarts.
Since the government says 75 percent of the 200 tons of raw sponges taken outside of Greek waters last year returned to Kalymnos to undergo the process necessary for commercial sale, the 28-year-old sponge retailer reasons his critters are Greek.
"I have more sponges than any other store in Athens," Bantabanos says. "But I have no idea where most of them come from."
"I'm flexible about what makes a sponge Greek," says Emmanuel Sakaleros, president of Sponge Traders International, an Athens-based company that last year processed and sold 30 tons of sponges and 2 million Egyptian-grown luffas to customers who have included Queen Elizabeth II, American organized-crime boss Meyer Lansky, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the opera star Maria Callas.
The 60-year-old Kalymnian bathroom-product executive and former Miami restaurant owner reluctantly admits that the homegrown Greek sponge is now mostly a myth.
In the same breath, Sakaleros says 10 percent of the world's 100,000 sponge-industry workers are Greek, and all of them are divers, processors or clippers. In the U.S., for instance, Greek spongers working out of Tarpon Springs, Fla., each year pluck and prepare about 360,000 sponges from the Gulf of Mexico worth about $1.4 million.
"Only a Greek knows how to dive for a sponge, and then turn it into a thing of beauty," explains Sakaleros, pointing his cigar toward a burlap sack of "fina" or silk sponges from the Bahamas and destined for the shelves of Harrods department store in London.
The sponge magnate lights his stogie and takes a thoughtful puff.
"All sponges are Greek" is his verdict.
The stuff of legends
Sakaleros says that despite the bacterial infestation, which continues to ravage most of the Mediterranean and causes harvested sponges to disintegrate into glop, the few to have survived the blight are cherished by connoisseurs. Sakaleros says the 7 tons of Libyan silks that annually reach the market fetch more than 90 euros ($111) a pound.
"Ahh, if I could find more Libyans," Sakaleros says. "They are clean and soft as air. Only the sponge pirates dare go in for them."
George Moussas, who has sponged the Aegean currents for 20 of his 57 years, says sponge diving "is the most dangerous business on Earth."
In the halcyon years 1965 to 1970, the men and children of the Moussas family would make four 197-foot dives each day, remaining submerged for 30 minutes and returning at the end of the summer season with 100 tons of sponges.
Experienced recreational divers with scuba tanks are advised to venture no farther than 131 feet.
"We made more money than a government minister," Moussas recalls. "Fear was never an issue."
Even after the invention of the closed diving helmet and air hose in 1840, Kalymnians continued to drape a stone around their necks, plunge in naked to reduce friction and regularly reached depths in excess of 230 feet — on one breath of air.
The cost was heavy. According to Greek government figures, between 1930 and 1977, divers with or without compressed air gear accounted for 10,000 deaths and 20,000 cases of paralysis from the bends, the decompression sickness that appears when a diver surfaces too fast and nitrogen bubbles form in the body.
Valsamidis is skeptical of the statistics. "During those years we lost three sponge divers each day, some 51,000 children and men," he says.
In 1979, researchers from the Institute of Human Physiology at Gabriele d'Annunzio University in Italy visited Kalymnos to investigate the fantastic tales of local lung capacity.
"I'm sure we Kalymnians are part seal," Valsamidis says. "I've spent more of my life underwater than I have sleeping in bed."
When not submerged, Valsamidis ushers visitors through his sponge museum, greets guests at his seaside tavern or selects merchandise for his family's supermarket.
"Kalymnians don't like artificial sponges," Valsamidis says firmly. "So I don't sell them."
Diamonds in the rough
As for the sponges fated to beautify the bathtubs of Olympic pooh-bahs, they all first arrive ashore covered in a rubbery slime and filled with gray jelly. Valsamidis violently stomps his smelly kapadika sponge with bare feet until the juice spews out. The sponge is then washed and immersed in seawater for a few hours, and then whacked with a stick to remove any remaining foreign objects. The stinky process is repeated until only the soft skeleton remains.
From there, the sponges often head to the Papachatzis Sponge Export House, one of the island's nine wholesalers that first wash and then use shears to clip and shape the bulk of global production. It's a mom-and-pop operation, where Nicholas Papachatzis and his wife each year bathe some 1,300 pounds of sponges in concrete tubs of seawater, hydrochloric acid and, for those customers who prefer blond sponges, a further solution of potassium permanganate.
"The uneducated public wants blond sponges, but they don't last as long as a pale sponge," says Aphrodite Papachatzis, wrapping a satchel of "Greek" silks for a German tourist. "For the body, what you want is a natural dark silk sponge that's been well sheared and is soft on the skin."
And that's precisely the sort of rub Olympic organizers have come to Sponge Traders International to find.
"The VIP Olympic visitors will go home with their sponges," Sakaleros proclaims. "And they will be Greek sponges."