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The Greek sponge-diving town on the Florida gulf coast that John Kiriakou calls one of his favourite places — settled for a century by divers from Kalymnos, the island immediately north of the one his own family comes from, and, in his verdict, the site of absolutely incredible Greek food.
Tarpon Springs is a town on the gulf coast of Florida with a Greek sponge-diving community and a working sponge dock downtown, and one of the few places John Kiriakou speaks about with uncomplicated affection. He was asked about it by a viewer on 19 November 2025 and answered before the question was finished.
The answer
“Oh, yes, yes, yes. Tarpon, man, is one of my favourite places.”[1]
His first specific was culinary. “The Greek food is absolutely incredible.”[1]
Where the people came from
The part of the answer that carries information is about provenance. In Kiriakou’s account the community is not generically Greek but drawn from one island. “They’re all from the island of Kalymnos down there — which is the next island north of where my family is from.”[1]
He dates the settlement in round numbers: “Tarpon has been a mecca for Greek immigrants for a century.”[1]
Why sponges
The explanation he gives for the town’s industry is occupational continuity rather than chance. “It’s because so many people in Kalymnos were sponge divers. And it’s the same situation in Tarpon, where you can dive for sponges — and they did, a hundred years ago.”[1][2]
His closing line was four words: “So yeah, I love Tarpon.”[2]
Why it matters in the corpus
Kiriakou’s Greek identity runs through a great deal of his commentary — on Greek politics, on family, on the Orthodox church, on the Greek diaspora in Ohio where he grew up. Tarpon Springs belongs to that thread, and is one of the clearest instances of how he thinks about migration: not as an abstraction about labour markets but as a specific skill carried from one shoreline to another, by people from one island, who kept doing the thing they already knew how to do.
The island name is rendered inconsistently by the automatic captions and is regularised here.
Sourced from John Kiriakou's on-record public statements. See his profile for the full body of his interviews, podcast appearances, and short-form video.
