Bloomberg reports that 10,000 special guests at the Athens Olympics will receive sponges as a Greek memento of their attendance at the 2004 Olympics. Each gift will be labeled as being Greek.
According to the Bloomberg report, however, the Greek sponge industry has not recovered from the effects of a ﾓsponge bacteriaﾒ which reduced Greek production at Kalymnos Island, the centre of the Greek sponge industry, from ﾓ30 tons in 1986 to 3.5 tons in 1993. Kalymnian divers have made up the difference from ﾓsponges in the Caribbean, the Phillipines and the Gulf of Mexico,ﾒ Bloomberg reported.
ﾓThis year,ﾒ sponge analysts say, ﾓdivers will be lucky to harvest a little more than a ton from the Aegean and seven tons from the rest of the Mediterranean Sea.ﾒ
While calls to diversify the economy, The Bahamas, a significant source of the sponges required to manufacture the top silk sponges of the $100 million sponge industry, remains an exporter of raw materials.
During his tenure as Minister of Agriculture, Pierre Dupuch visited the industrial park where Zendal Forbes was attempting to establish a fledgling operation importing sponge from Andros and then shipping it off to Florida where the Greek sponging industry had established operations around Tarpon Springs since the first decade of the last century, to harvest and import sponge which is subsequently shipped to companies such as Sponge Traders International, an Athens-based company that processed and sold 30 tons of sponges last year.
At the time of the interview, Mr. Forbes had said that given the fall off in the Greek sponge beds, there was an opportunity for Bahamians to begin to develop their own sponge industry by processing and creating the high-quality sponges that were being used in spas around the world.
Mr. Forbesﾴ assertion then that Bahamian sponges were being imported into Greece, processed, labeled and marketed as a Greek product is borne out nearly a decade later in the Bloomberg report which noted that the Greek government itself stated that ﾠﾓ75 percent of the 200 tons of raw sponges taken outside Greek waters last year returned to Kalymnos to undergo the process necessary for commercial sale.ﾒ
The process of turning the Bahamian sponge into a high end product is fairly straightforward, but Mr. Forbes at the time observed that Bahamian methods were still traditional.
ﾓWe still keep the sponge in a kraal and that puts a lot of sand in the sponge and makes it more difficult to clean,ﾒ Mr. Forbes had said. ﾓThe more modern method is to harvest the sponge into specially equipped sponge boats and to clean them by water-blasting, the accepted method today.ﾒ
Sponge lends itself to both small and large operations. A small staff can easily process the sponge. In Greece it is often a mom-and-pop operation. The Bloomberg report noted that one man Nicholas Papachatzis, and his wife prepared over half a ton (590 kg) of sponges a year by washing them in ﾓconcrete tubs of seawater, hydrochloric acid and a further solution of potassium permanganate for blonde sponges.ﾒ The mom-and-pop is known as the Papachatzis Sponge Export House.
The Bahamas Greek community had its beginnings in the sponging industry and the sponge divers came mainly from the Dodecanese Islands of Kalymnos, Halki and Symi the centre of the Greek sponge industry.
Believing as they do that only Greeks know how to prepare sponge as stated by Emmauel Sakaleros, president of Sponge Traders International, it is perhaps understandable that Greek communities outside of Greece have preferred to ship the raw material back to Greece rather than establish their own processing and marketing businesses.
Mr. Sakaleros told Bloomberg that “Only a Greek knows how to dive for a sponge, and then turns it into a thing of beauty,” explains Sakaleros, pointing his Cuban cigar towards a burlap sack of fina, or silk, sponges from the Bahamas, destined for the shelves of Harrods in London.
Unlike Campari, another international product based on a Bahamian ingredient, there is no mystery to creating high-end sponges. The belief however that Greece is the centre of the industry, despite having only 10 percent of the 100,000 persons working in the sponge industry, explains in part why The Bahamas remains an exporter of ﾑraw materialﾴ as opposed to the ﾓfina or silk, sponges from The Bahamas, destined for the shelves of Harrods in London.ﾒ
C.E. Huggins, The Bahama Journal
