Mediterranean Sky
The Mediterranean Sky launched in Eleusis, August 2002
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The Mediterranean Sky was a Greek ferry that entered service in 1953 as a combined ship under the name City of York for the British Ellerman Line . Mediterranean Sky, which was decommissioned in 1996 , had been in Eleusis Bay since 1999 , where it capsized in 2003. Her wreck, which has sunk more than halfway, can still be seen there today.
history
The City of York was built at number 122 at Vickers-Armstrongs in Newcastle and launched on March 30, 1953. In November 1953, the ship, which was delivered to the Ellerman Line in October, began the liner service from London to Beira .
The City of York traveled this route for the next eighteen years until it was sold to the Greek shipping company Karageorgis Lines in 1971 . In the following three years the ship was converted into a ferry in Perama and finally put into service in 1974 as Mediterranean Sky on the route from Ancona via Rhodes to Patras . The equipment of the Mediterranean Sky included two pools, two restaurants, various bars and lounges and shops. All cabins were air-conditioned and had their own wet room. Equipment and service were comparable to cruise ships of the era.
In August 1996 the 43 year old ship was decommissioned and laid up in Patras . After the Karageorgis Lines got into financial difficulties, the Mediterranean Sky was arrested in Patras. On February 15, 1999, tugs brought the ship to Eleusis for further lay-up, where it was waiting for a new buyer along with several other decommissioned passenger ships.
On 26 November 2002, received Mediterranean Sky of unknown causes increasingly list and was therefore taken into shallower waters to prevent a complete sinking. In January 2003, the almost fifty-year-old ferry overturned in shallow water after nothing was done about the water ingress and the rising list.
The wreck of the Mediterranean Sky lying in a small bay near the Elefsina Shipyard (position 38 ° 1 ′ 28 ″ N , 23 ° 29 ′ 21 ″ E, ) is easily accessible and therefore a popular destination for tourists. Plans to scrap the wreck have not yet been implemented.
In 2019 the German sprayer group 1UP published a video on YouTube that shows how they sprayed the capsized ship and immortalized themselves on the ship with the help of paint.
Sister ship
The sister ship of the Mediterranean Sky was the City of Exeter , commissioned in 1953 , which was also sold to Karageorgis in 1971 and was used as the Mediterranean Sea until 1992 . On July 9, 1998, the ship arrived to be scrapped in Aliağa, Turkey .
Web links
- technical data and history of the ship on faktaomfartyg.se (Swedish)
- Deck plan of the ship on ssmaritime.com (English)
Footnotes
- ↑ 12 Famous Shipwrecks That You Can Still Visit. April 4, 2014, accessed December 16, 2015 .
- ↑ Natural and environmental disasters in Google Earth. Retrieved December 16, 2015 .
- ↑ 1UP: 1UP - Mediterranean Sky - The Ship. In: YouTube. 1UP, July 6, 2019, accessed May 19, 2020 .
- ^ M / S City of Exeter. Retrieved December 16, 2015 .