Greek cruiser Georgios Averof

Georgios Averof was laid down at the Orlando yard in Livorno as the third of Italy's Pisa-class armoured cruisers, sister to Pisa and Amalfi. When budget trouble made Italy cancel her, Greece — rebuilding a fleet going obsolete around it — stepped in with a down payment of roughly 300,000 gold pounds, one third of her price, drawn from the bequest of the benefactor Georgios Averoff, whose name she took.

She came out of the yard a composite of Europe: Italian Ansaldo engines, French Belleville boilers, British Armstrong guns, German Krupp armour and generators. Her turrets were rounded pillboxes with convex roofs, unlike her Italian sisters', and she alone carried a foremast from the start. Greek touches were built in: a balcony on her stern in memory of the sailing ships of the War of Independence, a nameplate with the royal coat of arms, a steel ram in her inverted bow after the ancient triremes, and a small Orthodox chapel to St Nicholas fitted into a space designed as a magazine.

So urgent was the navy's need that she was accepted with a gouge inside one 7.5-inch barrel, which Armstrong's chief ordnance engineer judged harmless. Launched on 12 March 1910, she was the last armoured cruiser ever commissioned — a type the battlecruiser had already made obsolete. Her first captain took her to England for George V's Coronation Review in 1911, where she ran aground at Spithead and her crew brawled ashore over the mould on blue cheese. Pavlos Kountouriotis replaced him and drilled the crew all the way home, except at gunnery, since her ammunition came only from Britain. She reached Faliro Bay on 1 September 1911, the most powerful warship in the Balkan League or Ottoman navies.

The First Balkan War made her name. Kountouriotis, now rear admiral and commander-in-chief, flew his flag in Averof — under Captain Sofoklis Dousmanis — through the taking of the northern and eastern Aegean islands and into two actions against the Ottoman fleet. At Elli on 3 December 1912, frustrated by the slowness of the three older Greek battleships, he hoisted the signal Z for independent action and went forward alone at 20 knots, crossed the Ottoman T and concentrated on the enemy flagship until the Ottoman fleet withdrew in disorder. She fired her guns for the first time in that battle — the practice rounds had never been spared.

At Lemnos on 5 January 1913 the older ships again failed to keep up and Kountouriotis again went on alone. In both fights Averof took only slight damage while inflicting severe damage on several Turkish ships. Her crew took to calling her Lucky Uncle George; the Turks called her Şeytan papor, the Devil's Ship. The strategic result mattered more than the tactical one: Averof closed the Aegean to Ottoman transports bringing fresh troops and supplies to the Balkan front, and the armies there were decisively beaten. Without that control of the sea the Ottoman Empire might have reinforced the peninsula and fared better in the war.

The First World War gave her little to do: Greece was neutral for its first years and consumed by the National Schism, and after the Noemvriana riots of 1916 the French seized her, returning her only when Greece entered the war in June 1917. After the armistice she sailed with the Allied fleet to Constantinople and raised the Greek flag in front of the Hagia Sophia to an ecstatic welcome from the city's Greeks. In the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22 she covered troop landings in Eastern Thrace, shelled the Turkish Black Sea coast, and helped evacuate refugees after the Greek army's defeat.

A major refit in France from 1925 to 1927 gave her modern anti-aircraft guns, a tripod foremast and new conning tower, better fire control, and an overhaul of engines, boilers and furnaces; her obsolete torpedo tubes came out, and converting her to oil firing was judged too expensive for her age. In March 1935 she took Eleftherios Venizelos off Kasos after his failed coup. At the Coronation Review at Spithead on 20 May 1937 she was the only one of 150 ships present that had also attended the review of 1911, a fact George VI noted warmly to her captain.

On the morning of 18 April 1941, with the Greek front collapsing, Averof's crew disobeyed a direct order to scuttle her. They cut through the closed harbour boom with axes and handsaws, and Captain Ioannis Vlachopoulos climbed a rope ladder to join his ship as she was already under way. Under constant threat from the Luftwaffe she made Souda Bay and then Alexandria, arriving on 23 April.

Too slow and too lightly armed against aircraft for the Mediterranean, she suited Indian Ocean convoy work: more firepower than a contemporary heavy cruiser, if shorter-ranged, and twice the armour, needing no more than the 12 knots she could still manage. Her crew helped rescue men from the burning Cunard troopship Georgic at Port Tewfik in July 1941. Boilers unoverhauled since 1926 dogged her. She was detached from an oil convoy to Basra in September 1941 with faulty boilers, repaired at Bombay, and then, at gunnery practice that January, the recoil of one of her own eight-gun broadsides fractured two live boiler mounts and dropped them to the deck. Royal Navy men at the base christened her Georgios Never-off.

She was the only First World War armoured cruiser to serve in her original role in the Second, though she was never again called on to fire her guns in anger. On 17 October 1944, flagship of the exiled Hellenic Navy under Captain Theodoros Kountouriotis — the admiral's son — she carried the Greek government-in-exile from Cairo home to liberated Athens, where her flag was taken down and raised over the Acropolis by Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou.

Decommissioned in 1952, she lay at Salamis, then at Poros from 1956 to 1983. In 1984 the navy restored her as a museum ship at Palaio Faliro, where she remains crewed and regarded as on active duty, flying a rear admiral's flag; every Hellenic Navy ship passing through Faliro Bay pipes its crew to attention as it goes by. She is the only armoured cruiser left in the world. In October 2017, after dry-dock maintenance partly funded by the shipping philanthropist Alexandros Goulandris, she made her first voyage in 72 years — under tow, 250 miles to Thessaloniki, where 130,000 people came aboard in 53 days before she returned to her berth in December.