Kyril (ship, 1903)
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The Kyril (Bulgarian: Кирил ) was a passenger and cargo ship built in 1903 for the Bulgarian shipping company Societé Commerciale Bulgare de Navigation à Vapeur . Until 1906 it carried the British flag as Devonia , from 1934 as Eleni , Evangelos Georgiou and Fragiscos the Greek flag until it was sunk in 1941.
Construction and technical data
The ship was used as a passenger and cargo ship at the Grandes Chaud shipyard. d'Anvers in Hoboken (now a suburb of Antwerp ) with the hull number 97 placed on Kiel and ran beginning in 1903 from the stack . The completion and delivery took place in February of that year. The ship was 52.4 meters long, 8.2 meters wide and had a draft of 3.3 meters. It was measured with 441 GRT (according to other information with 509 GRT) or 211 NRT. The load-bearing capacity was 300 dwt . A triple expansion steam engine from the Société Anonyme Mt. d'Anvers from Antwerp generated 123 nominal or 750 indexed horsepower and enabled a speed of 9.0 to 10.0 knots with one screw . The ship offered accommodation for 44 first class passengers and 6 second class passengers.
history
British Devonia
The original client for the new building was the British shipping company Anglo-French Steamship Company from Saint Peter Port on Guernsey , which was founded there in 1898 by the entrepreneur Onesimus Dorey - as one of several shipping companies - and dissolved again in 1908. According to the sources available, the activity of the small shipping company with five ships - like the other companies of the founder - was in coastal trade between the Channel Islands, the British south coast and the French mainland. The Devonia, in turn, is said to have been used for tourist trips on the Thames. As early as 1906, the Anglo-French Steamship Company sold the ship again.
Bulgarian Kyril
In Bulgaria, the shipping company Societé Commerciale Bulgare de Navigation à Vapeur put the ship into service as Kyril in early April 1906 . Together with the Varna and the little Sofia , they formed the first expansion of the shipping fleet between 1903 and 1906. In the following years, the shipping company mainly used the ship on the Black Sea coast and the ports on the northern Aegean coast .
During the First Balkan War in 1912 which was Kyril first in the port of due to the blockade of the Turkish Navy Varna launched . In the Second Balkan War of 1913, the Bulgarian government moved all ships first to Burgas , then to Sevastopol , so as not to let them fall into the hands of the Romanian troops. From there, the Kyril and the other Bulgarian ships returned to Varna in July. During the First World War , the Kyril initially stayed in the port of Varna and from 1916 was used with the Sofia for food transports between Balchik , Kawarna and Varna.
In the summer of 1926, the Kyril replaced the decommissioned Sofia and took over her voyages in the coastal area until the summer of 1928, when she was replaced by the new ship Evdokia . In March 1931 the Kyril was finally shut down and sold two years later.
Greek Eleni , Evangelos Georgiou and Fragiscos
After being taken out of service in Bulgaria, many older ships came to Greece, where they remained in service for a few years. The shipping company Theodoros S. Loverdos took over the ship and used it as Eleni until it was sold in 1937. The shipping company Theodoros S. Loverdos from Piraeus was one of the many small Greek shipping companies of the time that only had a single ship. Even less information is available about the second Greek owner, the shipping company Evangelos G. Georgiou & Ioannis C. Miras , Piraeus. During these years the ship was called Evangelos Georgiou before being resold in 1940.
The last owner, the shipping company Fragiscos Sigalas from Piraeus, gave the ship a new name, which was now called Fragiscos , and was requisitioned by the Greek government in December of that year. In the following year, the ship fell victim to the fighting in Greece : On April 27, 1941, bombers of the German air force sank the Fragiscos under the command of Captain Georgios Fragiscos in a bay on the island of Kythera . The wreck was scrapped after the war.
Web links
- Devonia SS (1903 ~ 1906) Fragiscos SS (+1941) at wrecksite.eu , accessed April 5, 2019
- Greek ship losses in World War II: Fragiscos, in the Historical Naval Archive (with photos), accessed April 5, 2019
- Seefahrts-Zeitung - online edition (Bulgarian) (with photo), accessed on April 5, 2019
- Website of the Bulgarian successor shipping company Navibulgar (Bulgarian / English) , accessed on April 5, 2019
- Shipping company chronology at navbul.com (Bulgarian), accessed on April 5, 2019
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Greek ship losses in World War II: Fragiscos, in the Historical Naval Archive
- ^ Entry on Onesimus Dorey on theislandwiki.org
- ↑ cf. Onesimus Dorey on channelislandsshipping.je
- ↑ http://www.navbul.com/en/company/history/index.php
- ↑ Gelina Harlaftis: A History of Greek-Owned Shipping: The Making of an International Tramp Fleet 1830 to the Present Day , Routledge, London / New York 1996, ISBN 978-1-138-97603-0 , p. 431 ( limited preview in Google Book Search )
- ^ Donald A. Bertke, Gordon Smith, Don Kindell: World War II Sea War . Volume 3: The Royal Navy Is bloodied in the Mediterranean . Bertke Publications / Naval-history.net, Dayton OH 2012, ISBN 978-1-937470-01-2 , p. 429