Travellers' Checks | MV Astoria: the world’s oldest ocean going cruise ship to set sail for last time
- The former MS Stockholm is expected to be retired after an eventful, storied 72 years at sea
- Plus, the Spanish capital gains two grand new hotels in the coming months
Supposedly the world’s oldest oceangoing cruise ship, the MV Astoria has had quite an eventful life since setting out on her maiden voyage from Gothenburg, Sweden, 72 years ago, on February 21, 1948. Launched as the MS Stockholm, she ploughed her ice-breaking bow into the side of the SS Andrea Doria in 1956, sending Italy’s new showpiece luxury liner to the bottom of the ocean in thick, North Atlantic fog.
A few years later she was sold to an East German trade union and renamed the MS Völkerfreundschaft. It’s said that several people jumped ship to freedom during her cheap-and-cheerless cruises around the Baltic and to Cuba.
She was sold in 1985, and almost completely rebuilt by her new Italian owners in Genoa, in the mid 1990s, as a luxury cruise ship, and renamed MV Italia Prima. By 2008, when she was unsuccessfully attacked by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden on her way to Australia, she had been registered in Portugal as the MV Athena.
Renamed MV Astoria in 2016, she is currently operated by Cruise & Maritime Voyages, and will make her last trip for that company – from Hull, in northern England, to Norway, to view the Northern Lights – on October 18. It has been suggested that this may be her last voyage, and so likely the last chance to sail aboard this storied, historic ship.
