Cruise Ship, SS Odysseus

At the dock in Pireás (Athens) there were no custom’s agents, no security check, but at the dock next to ours, the cruise ship Achille Lauro (hi-jacked, and passenger killed in 1985), reminded us of potential problems with terrorism. (The Achille Lauro had been hi-jacked in 1985, then in 1994, caught fire and sank about 150 miles off the coast of Somalia.)

We had visited Míkonos on the SS City of Rhodes, and now again on the SS Odysseus. Scheduled to leave Míkonos at noon, they had a problem with the motor used to raise the anchor, so no-go. When that was fixed, we sailed across the Aegean Sea, through the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus, to Istanbul. Because of the delay in Míkonos, our scheduled stop in Bulgaria had been canceled, and at the end of the trip, the ship did not transverse the Corinth Canal, as originally scheduled.

In WW I, the British tried to land an Army in Gallipoli (on the Dardanelles), and as a result of almost complete stupidity, thousands men from Australia and New Zealand, were killed. The several people from those countries, on this ship, carefully watched the memorials to that battle, erected on the shore line.

Our dining table partners were very interesting. Lukas, who lives on Cyprus, is an artist and an architect. He lived with his parents in Spain before the Spanish Civil War, and they were living in Austria when Hitler entered Vienna. His wife was on the staff of Lord Mountbatten, and was the lone lady survivor on a ship that was sunk in the Indian Ocean, during WWII. The other man is a Greek from Australia, born in Egypt. When he visited Greece in 1974, they tried to draft him into the Greek Army — he had never even been in the country before.

After a night and half-day in Istanbul, the SS Odysseus sailed to Odessa, Ukraine. Since our ship is late, they canceled the visit to the Odessa ballet, so everyone is taking the city tour. The next morning we arrived in Yalta, Crimea, and joined the bus tour to Livadiya Palace where the famous “Yalta Conference” took place near the end of WW II. In a Yalta store, an abacus was next to the cash register, but when I tried to take a picture, the cashier quickly hid it. They did accept Visa.

A day and a night was spent at sea, on our return to Athens. At noontime, we entered the Bosporus and sailed past downtown Istanbul (a Soviet submarine sailing on the surface, was going the other way), with beautiful mosques and minarets on one side of the Golden Horn, skyscrapers on the other.