On the evening of 7 December 1966, a refrigerated truck was loaded aboard the Greek ferry SS Heraklion at Souda Bay, Crete — and that delay, those two extra hours, would cost more than two hundred people their lives. By 2:00 a.m. the following morning, the ship was six miles off the tiny rocky islet of Falkonera, deep in a Force 9 gale, when the truck — carrying oranges, strapped loosely or not at all — began slamming into the midship loading door. The door gave way. Water poured in. At 2:13 a.m., eight minutes after the first SOS, Heraklion's radio fell silent.
The Heraklion had begun life as the SS Leicestershire, built in Glasgow in 1949 by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company for the Bibby Line's route between Britain and Burma. By 1964 she had been sold to the Typaldos Lines and refitted as a roll-on/roll-off passenger-car ferry, plying the Piraeus–Crete routes. She was 498 feet long, displaced 8,922 gross register tons, and could carry 35 trucks in winter configuration.
On the night she sank, 264 people were aboard: 73 officers and crew, and at least 191 passengers. The exact number of passengers has never been established with certainty — it was customary then in Greece to board and pay once the ferry was underway. Among them were families, workers, ordinary travelers crossing the Aegean on a winter night. One passenger was Michael Robert Hall King, a 24-year-old grandson of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement. A survivor later reported that King had been helped into a lifeboat, then refused his place and climbed back aboard to help others reach safety. His body was never found.
Port authorities at Souda Bay had watched the weather build all day, prohibiting smaller vessels from leaving. The Heraklion, at nearly 9,000 tons, was deemed large enough to proceed. She departed at 8:00 p.m. — two hours late, the delay attributed to the loading of the refrigerated truck — into southeast winds that were already blowing at Beaufort Force 9. That is a severe gale: wave heights of four to six meters, the kind of sea that makes life at sea genuinely dangerous.
By midnight the ship was crossing the Myrtoan Sea, rolling heavily. Children were crying in their cabins. Cars on the vehicle deck were shifting. Water was beginning to find its way in. Then, at 2:00 a.m., the truck broke loose.
The sequence that followed was swift and catastrophic. The truck hammered the midship door until the door failed and the sea rushed in. The list grew by the minute. Officers tried desperately to stabilize the ship. At 2:06 a.m. came the first SOS: "This is Heraklion. The midship door has been destroyed. Ship is in danger." One minute later, the alarm was sounded and life jackets distributed. Lifeboats were lowered into thunderous waves. Seven minutes after that, at 2:13 a.m., the radio went silent.
The ferry Minos, 24 kilometers from the scene, never received the SOS. The Greek Ministry of Mercantile Marine was underequipped to handle the communications. Port authorities at Piraeus, Syros, and other islands reported they lacked the means to help. The navy ship at Syros would need three to four hours to get underway.
At 2:30 a.m., the coast guard commander was alerted. At 4:30 a.m., a naval vessel was finally ordered to sea. The air force was not alerted until 5:30 a.m. At 6:30 a.m., the prime minister told King Constantine. The first aircraft — a Douglas C-47 Skytrain — lifted off from Elefsis at 7:20 a.m.
When ships reached the scene at 8:30 a.m., six and a half hours after the Heraklion went down, they found nothing: no debris, no survivors visible. The first newspaper headlines reported the ship lost with all hands. The prime minister declared a week of national mourning. Then, slowly, survivors were found — scattered on life rafts, clinging to wreckage, having endured more than six hours in a December sea. Of the 264 people aboard, only 46 survived: 16 crew and 30 passengers. Officially, 217 died.
The investigation was damning. Typaldos Lines had conducted no drill for abandoning ship. The distress call had been delayed. The ship's officers had failed to organize a rescue. The company had faked inspection documents. Of their fifteen ships, twelve had failed international safety standards.
After a month-long trial that concluded on 20 March 1968, seven defendants received prison sentences of up to five years, including Haralambos Typaldos, the company's owner, and his general manager. Most of the Typaldos fleet was seized and sold to cover damages and crew severance. Three ships found no buyers; they rusted at anchor for twenty years before being broken up in Turkey in 1989.
In Chania, near the Cretan port where the Heraklion had embarked her last voyage, a sculpture was erected during the 1990s to the memory of those who died. It is called the Monument of the Hand. There is no monument at sea, over the place where 217 people drowned six miles from a rocky islet that most of the world has never heard of. But the people aboard that night were real: workers and families, a young man who gave away his place in a lifeboat. The Aegean holds them still.
The SS Heraklion sank in open water at approximately 36.87°N, 24.13°E, roughly six nautical miles northwest of the islet of Falkonera in the Myrtoan Sea, between the Argolid Peninsula and the island of Milos. There is no land to see at the wreck site — only open Aegean. The nearest major airport is LGAV (Athens International Eleftherios Venizelos), approximately 160 km to the northeast. At cruising altitude in clear weather, the southern Cyclades and the Argolid coast are both visible; Falkonera itself is a barely perceptible speck of rock. Approach from the north for the best orientation to the sinking site relative to the surrounding islands.