Big John” Papanicolaou, the Greek businessman who rescued Aristotle Onassis’s fabled yacht Christina (renamed Christina O), was a cigar-chomping, bear-like figure of a man with sharp-as-tacks intelligence matched only by his impatience. “I knew working for him on this boat would be a challenge,” recounts Costas Carabelas, the Greek naval architect who took on the design and management of the 18-month rebuild, which began 25 years ago in 1999. “I just didn’t appreciate how much.” Carabelas would suffer a heart attack because of the ordeal, but lives to tell the tale – here, for the first time. Papanicolaou, hereinafter Big John, died in 2010, aged just 60.
Christina was just as unique and rule-breaking as her first owner, who’d acquired the vessel half a century earlier. Shipping magnate Onassis had started out as a refugee in Buenos Aires and rose to become the richest man on the planet – and owner of the world’s most famous luxury yacht. The 99-metre was designed by the brilliant, controversial German Caesar Pinnau to offer otherworldly levels of opulence.
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.
Maria Callas and Winston Churchill on Christina, left, and with Aristotle Onassis in 1959
His vision was to scale up the accommodation from 24 to 34 guests, and the number of suites from 10 (including the owner’s) to 17 – all in an era (the 1990s) when boats rarely exceeded five cabins and 50 metres, and all in a narrow hull first built for speed. Providing for the extra facilities (seating, galleys, escape routes and other regulatory requirements), while keeping the yacht true to Onassis’s original vision, would, at times, seem Sisyphean.
Informed sources put the cost of the rebuild above $40 million (£31 million) – significantly more than the inflation-adjusted amount ($25 million) Onassis spent in 1953 ($4 million), converting the original Canadian frigate that he’d acquired after the Second World War for around just $30,000. Ingrained in the Greek ship-owning psyche was this ethos of repurposing secondhand vessels, and it was an ethos that Big John made good use of, as a hedge against the daunting financial costs: go after famous, even infamous yachts, whose renown or notoriety could take care of the marketing. It was a bold bet, but he was used to placing those.
The vessel has had several owners, the last one renaming her Christina O
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.
Canadian anti-submarine river-class frigate HMCS Stormont launched. The vessel served in the Second World War, including as a convoy escort during the Battle of the Atlantic.
Aristotle Onassis bought the ship after the end of the Second World War as naval surplus, at a scrap value of $34,000. The boat was remodelled by architect Caesar Pinnau and named Christina.
Onassis died and left the yacht to his daughter, Christina, and second wife, Jackie Kennedy Onassis. If neither were interested it would be turned over to the Greek government to serve as a presidential yacht.
Both women declined the inheritance. The Greek government changed the vessel’s name to Argo, but allowed it to decay. It was put up for sale at $16 million in the early 1990s, but it didn’t sell.
The vessel was purchased in a government-sponsored auction by Greek shipping magnate John Paul Papanicolaou, an Onassis family friend.
The rebuild began at the Viktor Lenac shipyard in Croatia, and Argo became Christina O. Papanicolaou added the “O” in tribute to Onassis.
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.”
