The last stop of Delphin was Aliağa, which was built as a car ferry named Byelorussiya at the Wärtsilä shipyard in Turku, Finland, and put into service by Black Sea Shipping Co on January 15, 1975. The ship, which was put up for auction on March 4 to pay off the debts of its last owner to the Viktor Lenac Shipyard in Rijeka, was purchased by a recycling facility in Aliağa. The ship was converted to a cruise ship in 1986.
Renamed Kazakhstan II in 1993, and from 1996 to its current name Delphin on the German market. She served as a cruise ship with Passat Cruises until September 2014, and for a short time in 2016, she served for the Turkish cruise operator Etstur.
Delphin, which also served as a hotel ship for the US Navy by connecting to the Victor Lenac Shipyard in Rijeka, Croatia in 2015, was left in the middle in 2018 after Argentine Alteza Cruises gave up on chartering at the last minute.
She was one of five siblings
Delphin, formerly Belorussiya, was one of five ships built by the Soviet-Russian Black Sea Shipping Company, designated as the “Belorussiya” or “Gruziya” class. One of Delphin’s sisters, “Azerbaijan”, named “Enchanted Capri”, was serving as a hotel ship on an oil drilling rig in Mexico City, and ran aground off Alvarado in October 2020, shortly before she was scrapped in 2020 and began cutting.
Two of them became casinos
Another Delphin sibling, Karelia, was used for a time as a casino ship in Hong Kong as “Neptune” and was scrapped in 2021 in Alang, India. “Kazakhstan”, which served as a casino ship in Florida under the name of “Island Adventure” until 2008, was scrapped in Alang, India, in 2012. “Gruziya”, which is currently named “Salamis Filoxenia”, was sold to a company called Prime Spot Ship Trading in Dubai in February 2022, after Southern Cyprus-based Salamis Lines ceased operations. The future of the ship is currently uncertain.