The untold story of Christina O

One anecdote serves to showcase the yacht’s significance. In 1959, Onassis invited aboard Sir Winston Churchill, opera singer Maria Callas (soon to become Onassis’s mistress), John F Kennedy and Kennedy’s wife, Jackie (later to become Onassis’s wife). Upon his death 16 years later, he left the boat to Jackie and his daughter, Christina, providing for $500,000 in annual upkeep of the vessel. The two women fell out and the boat was gifted to the Greek state, then abandoned, submerged, at a Greek naval base off the coast near Piraeus – which is where Big John found her.

Despite her demise, Christina’s legacy had lived on – among other ways, in the tans, sunglasses, espadrilles and similar accoutrements that set the trend for the superyacht lifestyle we now know. Alert to such shifts, Big John predicted a growth in the industry and the desire for bigger and bigger boats. “He’d say, ‘Forget about passenger, cargo or container ships; focus on yachts,’” recalls Carabelas. Rescuing Christina was an ambitious project – the “Rubik’s Cube” that the rebuild came to represent didn’t just result from Big John’s force of personality and unending interventions in the project.

Big John was an ex-ship owner himself and a significant real estate player with contacts in Montenegrin casino operations. He acquired the 117-metre Galeb, previously owned by Yugoslovian President Tito from the Montenegrin government. Another adventure took him and Carabelas to Nice, to buy Basrah Breeze, Saddam Hussein’s old boat. Yet Christina was the biggest prize. “What you have to understand is that Onassis had showed Greek people what was possible,” says Carabelas. “He proved to us that we could be people of consequence on the world stage. His one famous rule was that there were no rules, and without him and his audacity, the Greek shipping industry might be a third of what it is today.” Christina, named after the celebrated man’s daughter, projected all this and more. Perhaps Big John hoped that some of Onassis’s Midas touch might rub off on him.

Whereas Carabelas had revered Onassis and his famous yacht from afar, Big John knew both. He in fact came from Greek aristocracy; his parents had worked for the Greek royal family and his father was friendly with Onassis. As a young boy, he had been aboard. He knew Ari’s Bar and the barstools fashioned from whale scrotum. He knew the lounges in which Callas had sung, the library in which Churchill had read and snoozed, the mosaic swimming pool that shapeshifted into a dance floor and the movements of the other heads of state and celebrities who’d been there (Garbo, Monroe, Wayne, Sinatra, Burton, Taylor and on).

He knew Christina’s secrets, shape and feel; the disposition of her many tenders (including a glass-bottomed boat and a hydrofoil, not to forget the seaplane), the Aegean views from the aft deck at sunset and the gleaming, mythic interior details. For Big John, this project was business and personal.

Following Onassis’s death and the boat’s abandonment, scavengers targeted its ornaments, for example the gold used for maps embossing the cabin doors, with each map depicting a Greek island after which the cabin was named. “Thankfully, the looters didn’t appreciate the historic value of some of the other interiors such as Ari’s Bar and overlooked those,” says Carabelas.

The yacht's sorry condition helped deter other serious suitors, facilitating Big John’s acquisition of her in 1998 as part of an investor consortium. “When John called asking me to work on her, it was both a dream and nightmare scenario,” Carabelas says. Just how problematic the project would become was soon revealed. Cleaning the hull with high-pressure hoses opened up two enormous cavities in the steel. Ultrasonic testing of the plating suggested that 65 per cent of the hull needed replacing, rather than the 20 per cent originally predicted. This meant that instead of dry docking the boat for 60 days as anticipated, she would spend 345 days there. Ultimately, 630 tonnes of new steel and 95 tonnes of aluminium would be needed.

No Greek shipyard was available for 12 consecutive months. Carabelas managed to squeeze the wreck into the Viktor Lenac shipyard in Rijeka, Croatia. “We ended up keeping just two metres of the hull at the fore and aft,” Carabelas says. “ Even there, the sunk rivets of the wartime frigate needed special protection and treatment, meaning that many times the amount of work and replacement cost were spent saving those fragments [versus starting anew with them].” All pipework, cables, electrical systems and plumbing needed replacing. An estimated 90 kilometres of new wiring and 14 tonnes of pipework went in.

It soon evoked the ship of Theseus, and the paradox of identity: if all the parts of a vessel are replaced, one by one, when is it new again and not original? Was the historic Christina destined to slip away, after all, in this fashion? Big John thought he had an answer both to this paradox and the gathering sense of crisis. Carabelas recalls being sat down by Big John, who laid out old photos of the interiors, dating to the golden years of the boat, stipulating: “I want the interiors reinstated to be the same. Exactly the same,” he emphasised, thumping a black-and-white photo with his stout forefinger.

Apostolos Molindris, the renowned Greek architect, was appointed to devise a general arrangement or master plan that could reconcile the dizzying array of requirements, both aesthetic and functional. Big John, Carabelas and Molindris became the three -pronged trident pushing the project on. But Molindris was surprised by what he found. “In reality, John didn’t have that many photos, so we started doing picture research on the Onassis years using back copies of Life and the like,” Molindris explains. “What we were finding didn’t entirely marry up with the legend of the yacht.”

Everyone knew the lore of Christina, or thought they did. At the centre of it was the mythic extravagance of the Onassis years and the intensely proprietorial approach of the owner himself. “You could smash a $20,000 speedboat to pieces and not a word would be said,” a crew member recalled, “but spit on the Christina’s deck, and you were out of a job.”

Yet the more Molindris scrutinised the old interiors, the less basis he found for this lore. “Some of the artwork – the El Grecos, for example – were known to be fakes, which makes sense; it’s risky to hang priceless artworks on the high seas,” Molindris says. (Onassis had reportedly said, “If people want to believe they are authentic, why spoil their pleasure?”) “However, the famed lapis lazuli fireplace, which the looters left in place, had only a veneer of the precious stone. The balustrade of the spiral staircase in the central atrium was brass and marble but not remarkable. The stateroom’s gold faucets, taken, revealed fitments that were gold-painted metal.”

Providing for the extra facilities while keeping the yacht true to Onassis’s vision would, at times, seem Sisyphean

Even Ari’s Bar, left largely intact, raised as many questions as it answered. The legend was that this space had received as much love and care as anywhere, perhaps because of the money Onassis made from whaling (while reportedly flouting international whaling laws). The legend was that celebrities steadied themselves with handrails formed from the purest whale-tooth ivory, engraved with scenes from the Iliad and the Odyssey; their well-shod feet found footrests made from the teeth of a sperm whale, while their gazes lingered on wall-mounted timber purportedly from a Spanish galleon. Even allowing for the badly distressed state of the bar stools, it looked more kitschy than legendary when empty and not animated by those famous people, notably Onassis ,” says Molindris . “The glass of the bar counter was so thin that if you leaned on it too heavily, it might crack. It all showed just what a good salesman Onassis had been, and revealed how central his personality was to the way this boat worked.” Only, now, Big John needed the legend to be made real.

Meanwhile, for Carabelas, the conflicting goals of the rebuild were colliding at the very heart of the boat, where a new dining room was needed if the vessel were to accommodate three dozen guests (the previous dining room could only seat 12). “For John, omitting this room was a deal breaker for the entire project,” underscores Carabelas. Its inclusion needed to avoid disturbing any of the storied spaces, such as the bar. Helpfully, the removal of the original 1943 steam engines and boilers freed up space, but back in went two low-speed tubeless MAN diesel engines (the fluid systems were encased in the engine blocks), chosen to maximise the life of the power trains. They delivered a top speed of 19 knots, and massive torque at 800RPM – perhaps the same as an MTU or a Caterpillar engine running at 2,300RPM. The lower revs did guarantee longer maintenance intervals, yet the engines were tall.

“It was the turning point,” says Carabelas, with relief plain in his features a quarter of a century on

The gap in height between the engines and the main deck, earmarked for the new dining room, was the height of Big John – 200 centimetres. Carabelas recalls Big John towering over him, telling him that this could not stand. A solution was to pop the ceiling up through the main decking. “Impossible,” ruled Big John. It was as if he were channelling Onassis from the Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft in Kiel where the first conversion took place. There, Onassis had reportedly required the wheelhouse, resembling a whale’s head, to be redone – three times. The exterior shape of the boat was sacrosanct; the dining room ceiling could not be raised. “The boat’s profile cannot be changed,” bellowed Big John.

It did indeed seem impossible; fundamentally irreconcilable. In the late 1990s, 3D design software was not widespread. Certainly, Carabelas did not have it . He had his imagination, the time aboard the weekly flights shuttling him between the design work being done in Athens and the work undertaken in Rijeka (a trip he made 70 times), and the sense of the clock relentlessly running down. The feeling of fast, calm forward motion while airborne seemed to help his thinking, however.

The Eureka moment came from an unexpected quarter. In the master stateroom, Onassis had insisted on being able to step down from a sunken bath carved from Siena marble (a replica of one found at a palace in ancient Crete). The floor had in fact needed to be raised in order to provide him with the requisite descent, and the bath had since been removed, but the idea remained: could a similar step-down work for the dining room?

Yes. The floor plan of a narrowed dining space, in which the table was arranged longitudinally, could indeed be dropped down by several precious centimetres, in between the two big MAN engines beneath. “It was the turning point,” says Carabelas, with relief plain in his features a quarter of a century on. Molindris worked hard to upgrade the adjacent staircase-atrium in a way that felt authentic. Steps acquired sumptuous dark carpet between exposed marble edges; the mosaic installed at the very bottom, revealing Christina’s Omega-and laurel-wreath logo, lent a fitting focal point.

Connecting the various levels of the staircase to other key spaces and a passenger lift created a greater sense of openness and movement at the centre of the boat. Nearby, Ari’s Bar was painstakingly reassembled with subtle improvements in the wood, rope and other fixtures and fittings, not to forget thickened glass for the bar top, all of which lets guests experience the legend, unmarred.

Other elements might feel more familiar to those undertaking rebuilds today: among them, the relocation of the exhaust from the famous yellow funnel to the aft mast (the funnel becoming home to the air con units) and the overhaul of the tender fleet to include two wooden Hacker-Craft and enclosed lifeboats as well as life rafts. Yet the swimming pool/dance floor, the restoration of which took a full year itself, was unique. “Why did Onassis have this?” Molindris asks. “The yacht has ample deck space. There was room for both a pool and a separate dance floor. The answer seems to be that he liked the novelty of something that hadn’t been seen before.”

That novelty needed to be renewed. The pool/dance floor’s mosaic recreates a scene of a gymnast vaulting a Minoan bull from the Knossos Palace in Crete dated to circa 1,550 BCE – not the Minotaur, as is often assumed. Original mosaic tiles were retained. The pure copper pool surround is original as well – so too the intricate mechanism controlling the up - and-down movement of the floor, which is also regarded as a work of art, and housed in the steering room. The mechanism shares space with the stern thruster, which took over from the single rudder originally determined by the hull’s shape.

The specification of the interior furnishings made good on the expectations of Onassis’s earlier guests: in the dining room, there is the porcelain service by Bernardaud of Limoges, Waterford crystal by Rochas, and silverware by Ercuis and St Hilaire of Paris. Fabrics are from Mulberry; furniture is by Giorgetti. Despite deploying full-scale mockups, Molindris alone notched up 200 plan revisions courtesy of Big John. Still, “The project remains truly memorable after all these years,” says Molindris from the studio of his successful architecture practice on the Athens Riviera. Carabelas’ heart attack occurred right after the rebuild ended. He attributed it to “the stress that accumulated day by day” – and also a related back operation. “I don’t think a person can do such a job twice in one life,” he concludes. He remains a highly sought-after naval architect, and indeed continues to work on Christina O’s evolving needs.

Big John’s force of personality tested relations with other members of the ownership consortium. When he died (within a decade of the rebuild completing), his share passed to them. For all of the difficulties he caused, rare is it for a yacht to be described as one that can outlast any person alive, and he must take credit for the fact that Christina O is described in precisely this way. Ultimately, though, the legacy belongs to Onassis. Lloyd’s List named him as one of the three most influential men of the 20th century, alongside Malcom McLean, inventor of the modern shipping container, and Ted Arison, founder of Carnival Cruise Lines. From well beyond the grave, his presence – and the fascination with him felt by so many – lives on via this yacht.

Richard Burton said about Christina, “I don’t think there is a man or woman on earth who would not be seduced by the pure narcissism shamelessly flaunted on this boat.” Onassis allegedly responded, “I have found that to be so.” Over the 25 years that have elapsed since the rebuild began, one could argue that it is fairer to speak of pride than narcissism, but her enduring ability to seduce is beyond doubt, and the odds are good that she will continue to do so well into the 22nd century.

Christina O is available for sale and charter with Morley Yachts.

First published in the March 2024 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.