Mediterranean Sky Shipwreck

(Drone photo credit: Marialena Karatza)

Morning, Chums! It's really not my style to open a blog post with someone else's photo, but I think we can all see why I did. The awesomeness of this shipwreck can't really be done justice on ground level. It was drone footage that made me want to see it with my own eyes. Nevertheless, when I told people that I planned on swimming out to a capsized cruise ship, I had the usual response that I get whenever I plan on doing something bonkers. People either didn't think I was actually going to do it, or they tried to persuade me not to. But they're competing against the voice in my head that tells me that someday I'll be 90-ish, and reminiscing about the days when I could make it to the toilet on time. They have no power here. Let's have some crazy adventures now, while I can.

There was just one problem, and that's that I'm actually terrified of water. My earliest memory is nearly dying in a swimming pool as a child, and it's left a bit of an impression. But the shipwreck is only a mere hundred metres from the shore. I can do that, right? Well just to make sure, in the weeks leading up to my flight I visited my local swimming pool regularly to do a few laps and learn how to swim. Sure enough, I soon found out that I sucked. But I think the hardest part of any new activity is powering through being shit, and once I got over my initial anxiety, swimming was kinda fun. I kept at it and I got better. People told me that my new hobby of swimming wasn't as interesting as my old hobby of exploring abandoned things and trying not to die. They're the same hobby, fools! Let's get on with the show!

Just look at it! Isn't it cute? It is submerged to just over half of its width which, given that the ship is 22 metres wide, indicates that the sea itself is just over eleven metres deep.

But nevertheless, this is pretty dangerous in a sort of predictable, clear-cut and obvious consequences kinda way. Maybe someday 90-year-old me will be regaling his poor carer with tales of derring-do, or perhaps my derring-do is derring-done.

The swim was actually quite refreshing. I almost didn't want to get out. I was definitely going to take a more purposeless, relaxing dip once I was finished clambering all over this massive hunk of glorious sea litter. 

 

So despite its sunny setting, the story of this ship begins in the soggy UK, where it was constructed in 1953. A shipping company called Ellerman wanted to have a fleet of luxury liners going from London to South Africa, and so created a quartet of fancy ships. They had promenade decks, lounges, cafes, a sports deck and a dance venue overlooking the swimming pool. The first of the Quartet was the "City of Port Elizabeth," who had its maiden voyage from London to Beira in January 1953. The second ship, The City of Exeter, followed on its own maiden voyage in May, and then this ship, The City of York, set sail in November. The fourth ship, City of Durban, wouldn't set off until May the following year.

Ellerman had quite a hefty number of ships named with the "City of" prefix, (and a cargo ship named "SS Lesbian" sunk by a German U-Boat, but that's another story) but these four tend to get lumped together as "sister ships" for their shared London-Beira route and similar fates in Greece.

 

And thanks to the internet, we can see how this ship looked back in its City of York days.

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

Completely fucking different. Could the internet be lying to me? 

No, this really is it. It had extensive alterations to its superstructure later on in life, increasing its capacity, making it a bit top-heavy, and also upsetting a few purists who liked the original design better.

The four ships could make the journey from the UK to South Africa in fifteen days, which was actually quite an impressive speed in the 1950s. As well as going between London and South Africa, they'd also call at Hull, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. So it's safe to say that for a while they were a pretty big hit. Unfortunately for them, a whole new crazy method of transport was taking off, both figuratively and literally, and that was commercial aircraft! By the end of the 1960s, Ellerman was starting to feel the pinch, and soon The City of York and its siblings were rotting away in a port in the Netherlands, awaiting a buyer. 

 

But as you might have guessed, the four ships weren't just left rotting in the Netherlands forever. Greece was going through a post-war pre-oil-crisis shipping boom, with companies snapping up second-hand ships from all over the world, and in 1971 a chap called Michael A Karageorgis nabbed these four, intent on converting them all into modern luxury cruise ships. Keeping with the theme of them all having similar names, each ship had "Mediterranean" as a prefix.

 

 

And now here we are casually sat on the funnel of the last surviving of the four, The former City of York. Although "Surviving" is a term I use loosely. This is the only one that you can still physically go and see, but it's never going to sail again. I'm actually quite surprised that the life boats are still here. The ship might be sunk, but the lifeboats are presumably still functional. Wouldn't it be more practical and less costly to repurpose them on other ships? 

Over on the right, just before the big pole, is a window underneath a sticky-outy bit. Through there it's possible to see the ships bridge.

 

 

It's not the best image, and I've seen older photos that show it still with control panels, which seem to have fallen down into the water now. I'm sure a better shot could be taken from the actual water if one had camera that could survive getting wet. Alas, I did not. For now, we stick to the parts we can do.

 

 

The ship is on a slight slope, with the back of it being in deeper water than the front of it. The back of it is also considerably more decayed, which makes it a bit more dangerous. Down there, past the big square bit that was once the ships restaurant, there are a couple of swimming pools. I'll include an older aerial image of the ship that shows where they are in relation to where I am. 

 

(Image not mine, obviously)

 

So for context, I'm stood on the upper deck next to the life boat, and the pools are in the little crescent area, now totally submerged. So after all these years of abandonment, the pools are still full! 

What a terrible joke.

 

Time to check out the promenade deck before we all die laughing!

 

It's all a bit weird. I did wrestle with the idea of rotating my images to show the perspective as the passengers would have once seen, but then the sea was annoying me in the background, being this big vertical wall of wetness. So the ship is shown as I saw it. My floor is the ships wall, and the ships floor is my wall.

 

 

At the end of the deck is a set of stairs going upwards, and I've actually managed to find a shot from 1977 of people standing on here, with their inflatable life preservers, waiting for the life boats to be lowered down. 

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

I'm actually not sure what's going on here. The ship didn't go down in 1977, and I can't imagine someone stopping to take photos if it did. Perhaps it's a drill. 

 

Of the four Mediterranean ships, only two of them would ever actually be used. City of Durban, renamed Mediterranean Dolphin, sat in limbo for a while, as the good folk of Karageorgis pondered what to do with it, before concluding that they didn't really need it at all. It was destroyed in 1974. City of Port Elizabeth took a similar route. Initially named Mediterranean Island, the corporate bigwigs couldn't decide what to do with it, and as such it sat idle for years. In 1975, things seemed to be looking up when they renamed it "Mediterranean Sun," as if they finally had a plan for it, but then they changed their mind and scrapped it in 1980. 

That left the City of York and the City of Exeter, who each underwent extensive transformations into the Mediterranean Sky and the Mediterranean Sea. They were still identical, but now virtually unrecognisable from their former identities.

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

Here's the ship I know and love, enjoying its glory days, floating about all garishly yellow like a big buoyant cheese. And it's very strange for me to look at it here, knowing that I've walked along its hull, and jumped off its funnel.

 

Believe it or not, the ugly yellow hulls were actually pretty good selling points, because they made the ship stand out in a crowd. For a while, they had bright careers taking passengers from Patras in Greece, to Ancona in Italy. Here's a couple of old brochures:

 

(Image not mine, obviously)

(Image not mine, obviously)

This one is in German, advertising the two ships as a duo. I guess it didn't matter which one a customer ended up on, just as long as they ended up on one. The money all went to the same place. There's a big emphasis on car transport here, because the ships cargo holds had been turned into car decks, with the selling point being that people could get to Greece from Italy without having to drive. 

The Mediterranean Sky was 541 feet in length and 22 metres wide. It was said to have capacity for around 800 people and 470 vehicles, and as well as connecting Patras to Ancona, it was also the first cruise ship to connect Patras with Venice, and it also did little treks around the Aegean sea, connecting it to Turkey.

 

 

The name of the ship is printed onto the life boats. That's kinda cool.

 

 

So obviously I can't go up the stairs. But I can climb the railing! Of course, it has been decaying for over twenty years and was never built to support an adult humans body weight, so this could all go horribly wrong, but if it holds then it would enable me to walk on the ships hull. Totally worth the risk.

 

For all my preparation, learning how to swim comfortably and without risk of cardiac arrest from being so unfit, I'd failed to take into consideration that a big hunk of metal lying in the sun would be fucking hot! I'd left my shoes on the shore and now it was like walking on a frying pan.

But the pain in my poor too-ugly-for-onlyfans feet aside, isn't this amazing? Words couldn't express how giddy I was to be stood on this thing. I've been doing this whole "forbidden tourism" thing for over a decade now, but I've never done anything quite like this. The UK does have a few shipwrecks but nothing of this magnitude, and nothing in water I'd be comfortable swimming in. And also in the UK the urbex scene is a tiny bit stale. It all tends to move in a herd. That's not a dig at anyone. I'm guilty of following the crowd too. But it feels good to get out, leave it all behind, and have an authentic adventure. And if I'm being completely honest, it feels great to challenge myself, and do something that takes a little bit of effort and preparation followed by throwing myself out of my comfort zone with reckless abandon. Let's do more of that.

 

Down below on the ships funnel, it's still possible to see the faint red diamond insignia with the MK logo that I assume stands for Michael Karageorgis. This can be seen in older photos of the ship. I've managed to find one which shows people standing under it, albeit on the side that's been dunked under water.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

I'm quite happy with the above image because it gives us a sense of scale. My images alone don't really drive home just how big this ship is, because there's no frame of reference. Sometimes, and I never thought I'd say this, humans are useful.

 

 

But what's interesting about the red diamond logo is that even though it pops up in all the classic shots of this ship in its heyday, it wasn't in its most recent paint job.  

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

This image was taken in the final years of the ships life. It had a fresh new paint job which I personally think looks better than the bright yellow hull. The logo has been painted over by a new one, that being the company that owned it briefly in the late 1990s. So what we're seeing now is this paint job degrading, revealing the original paint job underneath. That's pretty awesome.

 

 

There was a bit of a shipping recession in the later decades of the 20th Century, but the Mediterranean Sky still got out there and went on some zany adventures. Firstly, in a twist I was not expecting, it got involved with Zionism. As the Soviet Union sputtered towards its final days, a lot of Soviet Jews fancied getting out of there. The Soviet Union wasn't exactly big on letting people leave, and even had the Jewish emigration movements leader, Antoly Sharansky, thrown into a labour camp for "treason." Times were messy, but as the Soviet era came to a close, the Zionist Gustav Scheller and his wife Elsa worked to facilitate the emigration of numerous Jews from Soviet territory to Israel. And to do that, they ended up getting their hands on the Mediterranean Sky. 

In 1992 the cruise ship did a number of trips to Odessa, which is now part of Ukraine, and transported around 1,400 Jews from the newly-collapsed Soviet Union to Haifa in Israel. Each trip took about four days, which seemed a little unbelievable at first, but when I looked at google maps I realised that they actually aren't too far apart. The Mediterranean Sky left Odessa, crossed the Black Sea, and entered the Aegean and Mediterranean via Istanbul. 

There was a veil of secrecy on the whole thing. A lot of Jewish attempts at emigration from Soviet territory had gone pretty badly. On the same week that the Mediterranean Sky made its first journey to Israel, a bomb in Budapest had just missed a bus full of Jews, and killed their escorting police officer. So the media in Israel was kept totally in the dark out of fear of any coverage leading to a terror attack on the cruise ship.

 

And here we have a shot of the Mediterranean Sky parked up at Israel. 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

The Mediterranean Sky saw some action again in 1993 when British troops used it for accommodation while they were stationed in Somalia. When US troops pulled out of Somalia, the ship was used to transport them from Mogadishu, the Somalian capital, to Mombasa in Kenya.

And then in 1994, the Mediterranean Sky headed over to Cuba, where it ended up parked at Guantanamo Bay as accommodation for US troops during the Haitian Refugee Crisis. 

 

Here it is, parked at Guantanamo Bay next to a hospital ship called "The Comfort."

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

And it seems that it was around this time that it lost the yellow, although it does still have the red MK logo on the funnel. 

But isn't this amazing? Before coming there, I had no idea it had any of this rich history. The ship has had a pretty impressive career.

 

 

Here we are right at the very back of the ship. As I mentioned earlier, the rear is significantly more decayed and crumbling away. The metal surface was a bit more dangerous to walk on. 

 

 

So the story goes that the Mediterranean Sky ceased operating while in the ownership of Michael Karageorgis, but in actual fact it was sold on to one other company following Michael's death in 1995. It was around this time that the Mediterranean Sky and its sister ship, the Mediterranean Sea, parted ways, no longer under the same ownership. Like the Mediterranean Sky, the sister ship had also been serving as an accommodation ship for the military, in Angola. It ended up in the hands of a company in Istanbul who renamed it Tutki and then did nothing with it. It was then renamed Alice, but once again, nothing happened. She was dropped off in Turkey in 1998 and then destroyed. 

And I happen to have found an image of it during its demolition.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

I'm adding it purely to show just how identical it is to the Mediterranean Sky, albeit by the end of its life it had a widely different paint job, with "Istanbul" written on the side in big friendly letters. But there's no mistaking that semicircular funnel and weird hooded bridge. 

 

Of the four "City of" Mediterranean-Something ships, only the Mediterranean Sky remained. Its new owners put a brand new logo on the funnel, which as we've seen, hasn't aged well. The ship made a few trips to Italy, its last journey being from Brindisi to Patras. But with the company having financial issues, the ship was arrested in Patras in 1997 for having unpaid port fees. This meant that it couldn't leave by order of a court. It sat in Patras until 1999, when the port authorities got sick of looking at it and had it towed home.

 

Here it is rotting away in the harbour.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

It's starting to look a teeny bit wrecked, but still showing a few signs of its former majesty. But alas, with nobody maintaining it, it eventually started to leak. It took on sufficient water that it was noticeably lopsided, so rather than wait for it to sink in the harbour, in 2002 a decision was made to tow it to shallow water and abandon it there. 

And here it is, in its final resting place. It's said that in 2003 it just rolled over onto its side. That must have made quite an impressive sight for anyone who happened to be visiting the sea that day.

One cool thing about the Mediterranean Sky is it's still possible to look in through the cabin windows.

 

So to make sense of the perspective, we're looking straight down. The cabin door is the floor. Theoretically it would be possible to jump down there and crawl down the old hallways, but then I'd probably be trapped.

 

 

In this cabin, the mattress has fallen across the doorway.

 

Somehow miraculously the bedding in this cabin is still on the bed.

 

The better cabins are in the ships upper decks and towards the front.

 

 

Check it out! Again, the perspective here is looking down, so that soggy mattress there is on the new ground. The lamps are similarly reflecting the direction of gravity. The furniture is, of course, bolted to the floor. The reason seems pretty obvious. In choppy waters, passengers don't want everything sliding around their cabin. And because of that, we get to see these rooms in roughly their authentic layout despite the fact that they've been tilted ninety degrees. Isn't that great?

But the really cool thing about this particular cabin is there's still a radio there in the bedside table! It's impossible to get to without a rope, but it's also nicely shielded from the elements. I wonder if it still works.

 

 

Here the drawers have fallen down into the cabin entrance, but in others, they're still attached to the cabin floor. 

 

 

Here's another one that still retains its bedding and has a radio in the bedside drawer. It's remarkable that when the ship stopped being used, the owners made no effort to remove anything that could be repurposed. Everything that was from this ship stayed with this ship. It's almost as if they expected to be able to sail it again someday.

 

And that appears to be that. I honestly think that this is one of my favourite locations. I absolutely loved it here and didn't want to leave. Of course, now that I have an underwater camera I am pretty eager to return and see what nooks can be found from sea level. I have no doubt at all that things like the bridge, and the restaurant in the upper decks can be photographed. I just need a camera that I don't mind getting splashed. 

 

In 2009 it was announced that this area would be getting cleaned up. It was something of a ship graveyard by that point, with about eighteen abandoned ships in the area. But over a decade later, the other ships have gone and the Mediterranean Sky is still here, the last member of the original City-Of quartet. It's got a proud history. It's been all over the world and has quite an impressive legacy. In a way it's sad to see it like this, but at the same time, it is still being enjoyed. It's a bit of an obscure tourist attraction for those who know about it and fancy something a little unusual that doesn't require an admission fee. Swimmers come here to dive off the ship. Free-runners come here to practice parkour. I've even seen videos of people using its sloped hull to do water-skiing stunts. More famously, in 2017 a graffiti group called the "1up Crew" came out here and painted a huge blue "1up" on the ships hull, which was visible on Google Earth, although it hasn't aged well. It's just far enough from the city that getting here makes for a nice day out, but not too far that it's a faff to get to.

And I fucking love it. I rarely say this because return journeys always make me a bit sad, but I would totally come here again and again. It's like a great big playground sticking out of the sea. 

Having said that, I also wouldn't mind doing other shipwrecks. The Mediterranean Sky is a gateway drug. 

But that's all I've got for today! 

And look, I don't want anyone to die from an awesomeness overdose, so my next two blogs will be some rather mellow locations in the UK, like a house and a college or something. It will all be pretty chilled. I still have a few more Greek locations to do, but I'll get around to those later.

In the meantime, to stay updated on my shitty blog thing, follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Vero, and Reddit. I'm also on Twitter and Threads but let's be honest, nobody would notice if I suddenly wasn't. Including me.

Thanks for reading! Stay Sexy!