On a summer morning, our 95-year-old friend, Giannis Kourmadias, was narrating the story of the floating dry dock, while I was taking notes on my notebook. “Bacino galleggiante [floating dry dock] was how the Italians used to call it. We called it the floating dock. It was as big as a mountain and more than 100 meters long. It had seven big floodable buoyancy chambers. It was a huge metal construction with the capability to be submerged into the sea for a short period of time, long enough for any vessel to be positioned on its main deck, with the support of tugs and divers. Then, it – I mean the tank, along with the vessel that had been carefully placed on its main deck by the divers- would be slowly resurfaced by pumping out the water from its chambers. Keep in mind that -at the time- there were permanently more than twenty navy ships and around ten submarines in the harbour. I fixed the walls of this tank with my own hands, Franco, and then, they took it, to the long journey of no return.”

Giannis Kourmadias