Kassos Maritime Museum

In a house-museum in Fry, literally built by one man's hands, the maritime memory of the entire island is preserved — sextants, compasses, ship models, naval documents and diplomas of captains who traveled all over the world. The Kasos Maritime Museum is the personal legacy of a captain who dedicated his life to ensuring that this history is not lost.

The Maritime Museum of Kasos hosts the personal collection of Captain Antonis Hadjipetros, former captain of the Merchant Navy and former deputy mayor of the island. Its premises display sextants, compasses and other nautical instruments, models and watercolors of old and new ships, as well as small everyday objects from sailing ships, period steamships and diesel ships — a journey through three different eras of shipping. Its display cases also contain rare documents: diaries, maps, charter parties, ship purchase and sale contracts, wills and sea loans of sailors, diplomas of Kassian captains and certificates of nautical competence, along with a multitude of old photographs and mechanical parts from boats.

The foundation of the museum has its roots in 1977, when the Kassiotes Association «O Hadiotis» was founded in Rhodes, with the aim — among other things — of saving the island’s maritime heritage. The project progressed years later, when the president of the association granted Captain Hadjipetro the building that would eventually house the collection. Since 2013, the captain himself has been personally welcoming visitors and travelers to this unique «house-museum», which he had shaped with his own hands — a detail that gives the collection a much more personal character than that of a conventional museum.

A collection that speaks for the entire island

The value of the Maritime Museum lies not only in its exhibits, but also in what it expresses: for the people of Kassiotis, the sea was never a limit, but the means through which their place spread far beyond its geographical borders — through trade with Alexandria, participation in the Struggle of 1821 and, later, the shipbuilding tradition that developed after the return of the survivors of the 1824 Holocaust. Each object in the museum — from a simple boat component to a captain's diploma — thus functions as another piece of the same, unified narrative of how such a small island managed to leave such a big mark on the maritime history of the eastern Mediterranean.