Onassis Foundation

The Onassis Business Archive, as the greater part of the Onassis Archive, covers the business activities of Aristotle Onassis and his family before 1975, and subsequently those of the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation from 1975 onwards. Its creation constitutes an innovation in the field of business archives in Greece and particularly of shipping as most of the other archives are concerned with industry and banks. At the same time, it documents the entrepreneurial history of one of the most important tanker management businesses in the world. The pioneering career of Onassis, his international influence, and his contribution to world shipping render the Archive valuable, as it reveals his activities, which were born and grew outside Greece, but are based in Greece today. Furthermore, it is of special interest as the greater part was drafted in a variety of languages (English, Spanish, French, and Greek), which makes it accessible at an international level.
The Archive provides for the first time a picture of, and evidence for, the operation of what was a multinational shipping (for the most part) business group, with companies on three continents (Europe, Asia, America) and 14 countries (Greece, France, Monaco, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Britain, Argentina, Uruguay, Panama, Honduras, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Liberia), and activities throughout the world. The innovation that Aristotle Onassis introduced at an international level was his pioneering work in the creation of a model of a global shipping business, which is still followed today. This model was based upon the formation of a host of offshore companies, among the first of their kind, together with multi-holding companies, established at multiple management locations.
Thus, the uniqueness of the Archive lies at multiple levels. First, the archives of the group have been collated from the various centres of management, such as Montevideo, Monte Carlo, New York, London, Switzerland and Lichtenstein, as well as from the various offices in Greece. Second, the Archive covers chronologically the development of Onassis’s business activities from their beginnings in 1924 to the present day. Consequently, the Archive is complete, that is, it has a systematic sequence of activities of almost all the companies during Onassis's lifetime, and subsequently, until the present day, without gaps. Third, the Archive contains details of the first Panamanian and Liberian shipping companies in the world, the first instances of international shipping financing and loan agreements from the American financial market, the first post-War shipbuilding in German shipyards, and their evolution. Fourth, the Archive gives a picture of the activities of ‘Onassis’s people’, the executives, the seamen, and the office employees throughout the world. Fifth, the Archive, with additional material from various sources, supplements the archive on the Onassis family with valuable and unique personal correspondence and photographic material.
More than than 1,000,000 documents in 4,991 files were recorded in the Onassis Archive by the end of 2020. The Archive up to 1975 consists of 683 archival boxes containing 350,000 documents, some dating from 1898. The recording of the Onassis Business archive continues.

*For more on the Onassis Archive see Amalia Pappa, Alexandra Papadopoulou and Gelina Harlaftis, "The Archive of the Aristotle Onassis Business: ‘Underway’" in Gelina Harlaftis (ed.), Onassis Business History, Leiden, Brill Publications, 2023.