1.
Romania
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Romania is a sovereign state located in Southeastern Europe. It borders the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia and it has an area of 238,391 square kilometres and a temperate-continental climate. With over 19 million inhabitants, the country is the member state of the European Union. Its capital and largest city, Bucharest, is the sixth-largest city in the EU, the River Danube, Europes second-longest river, rises in Germany and flows in a general southeast direction for 2,857 km, coursing through ten countries before emptying into Romanias Danube Delta. The Carpathian Mountains, which cross Romania from the north to the southwest are marked by one of their tallest peaks, Moldoveanu, modern Romania was formed in 1859 through a personal union of the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The new state, officially named Romania since 1866, gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1877, at the end of World War I, Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia united with the sovereign Kingdom of Romania. Romania lost several territories, of which Northern Transylvania was regained after the war, following the war, Romania became a socialist republic and member of the Warsaw Pact. After the 1989 Revolution, Romania began a transition back towards democracy and it has been a member of NATO since 2004, and part of the European Union since 2007. A strong majority of the population identify themselves as Eastern Orthodox Christians and are speakers of Romanian. The cultural history of Romania is often referred to when dealing with artists, musicians, inventors. For similar reasons, Romania has been the subject of notable tourist attractions, Romania derives from the Latin romanus, meaning citizen of Rome. The first known use of the appellation was attested in the 16th century by Italian humanists travelling in Transylvania, Moldavia, after the abolition of serfdom in 1746, the word rumân gradually fell out of use and the spelling stabilised to the form român. Tudor Vladimirescu, a leader of the early 19th century. The use of the name Romania to refer to the homeland of all Romanians—its modern-day meaning—was first documented in the early 19th century. The name has been officially in use since 11 December 1861, in English, the name of the country was formerly spelt Rumania or Roumania. Romania became the predominant spelling around 1975, Romania is also the official English-language spelling used by the Romanian government. The Neolithic-Age Cucuteni area in northeastern Romania was the region of the earliest European civilization. Evidence from this and other sites indicates that the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture extracted salt from salt-laden spring water through the process of briquetage
2.
Blohm+Voss
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Blohm + Voss. also written historically as Blohm & Voss and Blohm und Voss. is a German shipbuilding and engineering company. It is currently a subsidiary of ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems, the company also oversees maintenance and repair of large cruise ships such as RMS Queen Mary 2 and the MS Queen Victoria. In the 1930s the company established the Hamburger Flugzeugbau subsidiary which built aircraft before and during World War II and, shortly after the wars outbreak, took on its parent companys name. ThyssenKrupp announced in December 2011 that it had agreed the sale of Blohm + Voss civil shipbuilding division to British investment company STAR Capital Partners, on September 28,2016, it was announced that Lürssen would acquire Blohm + Voss in a long-term partnership. Blohm & Voss was founded on 5 April 1877, by Hermann Blohm, the company name was shown with the ampersand until 1955. The companys logo is now a dark blue rectangle with rounded corners bearing the white letters Blohm+Voss. The company has built ships and other large machinery continuously for 125 years and it now builds warships both for the German Navy and for export, as well as oil drilling equipment and ships for numerous commercial customers. It administers the Elbe 17 dry dock at Hamburg, the company is, along with Howaldtswerke at Kiel and Nordseewerke at Emden, a subsidiary of ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems. With the rise of the Nazi Party to power in 1933 and this rescued the company, then run by brothers Rudolf and Walther Blohm, from a financial crisis. From July 1944 to April 1945 the company used inmates of its own concentration subcamp at its shipyard in Hamburg-Steinwerder, a memorial stands on the site of the camp and the company continues to pay an undisclosed amount to the Fund for Compensation of Forced Laborers. The first planes it produced had the company designation Ha, e. g. Ha 135, richard Vogt joined the Hamburger Flugzeugbau as Chief Designer not long after its formation. He was highly innovative and many of his designs had unusual features and his most significant design were flying boats, used by the Luftwaffe for maritime patrol and reconnaissance. Most numerous was the BV138, a twin-boom trimotor, while the BV222 Wiking was much larger, largest of all was the BV238 prototype, the largest aircraft built by any of the Axis forces. Other notable types include the asymmetric BV141, which was built in moderate numbers, Blohm & Voss was established in the days of sail and did not produce a notable steamship until 1900. TS Pretoria and TS Windhuk, Deutsche Ost-Afrika Linie passenger cargo liners, MV Wilhelm Gustloff, Kraft durch Freude cruise ship and the worlds worst maritime disaster when she was sunk towards the end of the Second World War MV Aurora As the Wappen Von Hamburg. It was the first luxury liner to be built after World War II, grille – built as the German state yacht, converted to minelayer at the beginning of World War II, later reconverted to state yacht of Nazi Germany, Hitlers official maritime conveyance. Lady Moura – the 19th-largest private yacht MV Savarona – built for an American heiress in 1931, later the Turkish Presidential yacht and now a charter yacht. Still among the largest yachts, at 446 feet long, some munitions, such as glide bombs, were included in the series designations.111 – a design similar to the 237, except that it was a flying boat with three engines
3.
Hamburg
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Hamburg, officially Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, is the second largest city in Germany and the eighth largest city in the European Union. It is the second smallest German state by area and its population is over 1.7 million people, and the wider Hamburg Metropolitan Region covers more than 5.1 million inhabitants. The city is situated on the river Elbe, the official long name reflects Hamburgs history as a member of the medieval Hanseatic League, a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire, a city-state, and one of the 16 states of Germany. Before the 1871 Unification of Germany, it was a sovereign state. Prior to the changes in 1919, the civic republic was ruled by a class of hereditary grand burghers or Hanseaten. Though repeatedly destroyed by the Great Fire of Hamburg, the floods and military conflicts including WW2 bombing raids, the city managed to recover and emerge wealthier after each catastrophe. On the river Elbe, Hamburg is a port and a global service, media, logistics and industrial hub, with headquarters and facilities of Airbus, Blohm + Voss, Aurubis, Beiersdorf. The radio and television broadcaster NDR, Europes largest printing and publishing firm Gruner + Jahr, Hamburg has been an important financial centre for centuries, and is the seat of Germanys oldest stock exchange and the worlds second oldest bank, Berenberg Bank. The city is a fast expanding tourist destination for domestic and international visitors. It ranked 16th in the world for livability in 2015, the ensemble Speicherstadt and Kontorhausviertel was declared a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO in 2015. Hamburg is a major European science, research and education hub with several universities and institutes and its creative industries and major cultural venues include the renowned Elbphilharmonie and Laeisz concert halls, various art venues, music producers and artists. It is regarded as a haven for artists, gave birth to movements like Hamburger Schule. Hamburg is also known for theatres and a variety of musical shows. St. Paulis Reeperbahn is among the best known European entertainment districts, Hamburg is on the southern point of the Jutland Peninsula, between Continental Europe to the south and Scandinavia to the north, with the North Sea to the west and the Baltic Sea to the north-east. It is on the River Elbe at its confluence with the Alster, the city centre is around the Binnenalster and Außenalster, both formed by damming the River Alster to create lakes. The island of Neuwerk and two neighbouring islands Scharhörn and Nigehörn, in the Hamburg Wadden Sea National Park, are also part of Hamburg. The neighbourhoods of Neuenfelde, Cranz, Francop and Finkenwerder are part of the Altes Land region, neugraben-Fischbek has Hamburgs highest elevation, the Hasselbrack at 116.2 metres AMSL. Hamburg has a climate, influenced by its proximity to the coast
4.
Germany
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Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a federal parliamentary republic in central-western Europe. It includes 16 constituent states, covers an area of 357,021 square kilometres, with about 82 million inhabitants, Germany is the most populous member state of the European Union. After the United States, it is the second most popular destination in the world. Germanys capital and largest metropolis is Berlin, while its largest conurbation is the Ruhr, other major cities include Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf and Leipzig. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity, a region named Germania was documented before 100 AD. During the Migration Period the Germanic tribes expanded southward, beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation, in 1871, Germany became a nation state when most of the German states unified into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic, the establishment of the national socialist dictatorship in 1933 led to World War II and the Holocaust. After a period of Allied occupation, two German states were founded, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, in 1990, the country was reunified. In the 21st century, Germany is a power and has the worlds fourth-largest economy by nominal GDP. As a global leader in industrial and technological sectors, it is both the worlds third-largest exporter and importer of goods. Germany is a country with a very high standard of living sustained by a skilled. It upholds a social security and universal health system, environmental protection. Germany was a member of the European Economic Community in 1957. It is part of the Schengen Area, and became a co-founder of the Eurozone in 1999, Germany is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the G8, the G20, and the OECD. The national military expenditure is the 9th highest in the world, the English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine. This in turn descends from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz popular, derived from *þeudō, descended from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂- people, the discovery of the Mauer 1 mandible shows that ancient humans were present in Germany at least 600,000 years ago. The oldest complete hunting weapons found anywhere in the world were discovered in a mine in Schöningen where three 380, 000-year-old wooden javelins were unearthed
5.
Barque
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A barque, barc, or bark is a type of sailing vessel with three or more masts having the fore- and mainmasts rigged square and only the mizzen rigged fore-and-aft. The word barque entered English via French, which in came from the Latin barca by way of Occitan. The Latin barca may stem from Celtic barc or Greek baris, the Oxford English Dictionary considers the latter improbable. The word barc appears to have come from Celtic languages, the form adopted by English, perhaps from Irish, was bark, while that adopted by Latin as barca very early, which gave rise to the French barge and barque. In Latin, Spanish and Italian the term refers to a small boat. French influence in England led to the use in English of both words, although their meanings now are not the same, well before the 19th century a barge had become interpreted as a small vessel of coastal or inland waters. Somewhat later, a became a sailing vessel of a distinctive rig as detailed below. In Britain, by the century, the spelling had taken on the French form of barque. Francis Bacon used this form of the word as early as 1592, throughout the period of sail, the word was used also as a shortening of the barca-longa of the Mediterranean Sea. The usual convention is that spelling barque refers to a ship and bark to tree hide, barcarole in music shares the same etymology, being originally a folk song sung by Venetian gondolier and derived from barca - boat in Italian. In the 18th century, the British Royal Navy used the bark for a nondescript vessel that did not fit any of its usual categories. She happened to be a sailing vessel with a plain bluff bow. Our Northern Mariners, who are trained in the coal-trade, apply this distinction to a broad-sterned ship, hon. the Earl of Sussex, Lord Deputy of Ireland. By the end of the 18th century, the term came to refer to any vessel with a particular type of sail-plan. This comprises three masts, fore-and-aft sails on the aftermost mast and square sails on all other masts, barques were the workhorse of the Golden Age of Sail in the mid-19th century as they attained passages that nearly matched full rigged ships but could operate with smaller crews. Conversely, the ship rig tended to be retained for training vessels where the larger the crew, another advantage is that a barque can outperform a schooner or barkentine, and is both easier to handle and better at going to windward than a full-rigged ship. Usually the main mast was the tallest, that of Moshulu extends to 58 m off the deck, the four-masted barque can be handled with a surprisingly small crew—at minimum, ten—and while the usual crew was around thirty, almost half of them could be apprentices. Today many sailing ships are barques
6.
Romanian Naval Forces
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The Romanian Navy is the navy branch of the Romanian Armed Forces, it operates in the Black Sea and on the Danube. It traces its history back to 1860, the Romanian Navy was founded in 1860 as a river flotilla on the Danube. The navy was French-trained and organized, officers were initially sent to Brest Naval Training Centre in France, as the Military School in Bucharest did not have a naval section. The first Commander-in-chief of the navy was Colonel Nicolae Steriade, the base was first established in 1861 at Izmail, but it was later relocated in 1864 at Brăila and in 1867 at Galați. The equipment was modest at best, with 3 ships from Wallachia and 3 from Moldavia, the main goal of the navy was to organize, train and expand this small force. The first seamens training school was established in 1872 at Galați for officers, the first acquisition of the Romanian Navy was the steamboat Prințul Nicolae Conache Vogoride. The ship was purchased in 1861 and was transformed into a warship at Meyer naval shipyard in Linz. In 1867, the royal yacht Ștefan cel Mare entered service, in October 1873, the Fulgerul gunboat, ordered by the Romanian state as the first purpose-built warship in the history of the Romanian Navy, was finished at the Toulon shipyard in France. However, the ship was unarmed, so she would be allowed passage through the Turkish straits, after arriving in Romania in April 1874, she was fitted with a Krupp cannon in a mild steel turret at the Galați shipyard. The next ship to service with the Romanian Navy was the spar torpedo boat Rândunica in 1875. These ships represented the Romanian Flotilla during the War of Independence, during the War of Independence, the name used in Romanian historiography to refer to the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish war, the Romanian Navy sailed under the Russian flag. The main success of the war was the sinking of the Turkish river monitor Seyfî near Măcin by a group of torpedo boats including Rândunica. Another notable success was the sinking of the Turkish river monitor Podgoriçe by the Romanian coastal artillery on 7 November 1877, after the war, the navy transported the Romanian troops back across the Danube. The small, but successful navy had demonstrated the need for a strong Danube flotilla in order to secure the border of Romania. Three rearmament plans were implemented, during 1883-1885, 1886-1888 and 1906-1908 and these plans mainly concentrated on the Danube flotilla. In 1898, the Flotilla Corps, as it was known then, was organized in two sections, the Danube fleet and the Black Sea fleet. The riverine base was at Galați, while the base was at Constanța. After the War of Independence, two naval rearmament programs were proposed for the Black Sea flotilla, the 1899 program called for six coastal battleships, four destroyers and twelve torpedo boats
7.
Gorch Fock (1933)
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Gorch Fock I is a German three-mast barque, the first of a series built as school ships for the German Reichsmarine in 1933. She was taken as war reparations by the Soviet Union after World War II and she is a museum ship, and extensive repairs were carried out in 2008. The Federal German government built a replacement training ship Gorch Fock which is still in service, the German school ship Niobe, a three-masted barque, capsized on 26 July 1932 in the Baltic Sea near Fehmarn due to a sudden squall, killing 69. The loss prompted the German Navy to order a new training vessel built, the contract went to the shipyard of Blohm & Voss in Hamburg, where construction began on 2 December 1932. She was completed in only 100 days, on 3 May 1933 the ship was launched and named Gorch Fock in honor of German writer Johann Kinau who wrote under the pseudonym Gorch Fock. Kinau had died in the 1916 Battle of Jutland aboard the cruiser SMS Wiesbaden, commissioned by the German Navy on 26 June 1933, Gorch Fock is a three-masted barque. She has square sails on the fore and main masts, and is rigged on the mizzen. The steel hull has a length of 82.1 m, a width of 12 m. She has a displacement at full load of 1510 tons and her main mast stands 41.30 m high above deck and she carries 23 sails totalling 1,753 m2. She is equipped with an engine of 410 kW. The training ship was designed to be robust and safe against capsizing, more than 300 tons of steel ballast in the keel give her a righting moment large enough to bring her back in the upright position even when she heels over to nearly a 90°. Gorch Fock served as a vessel for the German Reichsmarine prior to World War II. During the war, she was an office ship in Stralsund. On 1 May 1945, the crew scuttled her in shallow waters off Rügen in an attempt to avoid her capture by the Soviets, the Soviets ordered Stralsund-based company B. Staude Schiffsbergung to raise and salvage her, which after some difficulties was done in 1947 at a cost of 800,000 Reichsmark and she was under restoration between 1948 and 1950. She was then named Tovarishch in 1951 and put into service as a training vessel and her new home port was Odessa. She participated in many Tall Ships Races and cruised far and wide on the seven seas and she made a voyage around the world in 1957 and won the Operation Sail race twice, in 1974 and 1976. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tovarishch sailed under the Ukrainian flag until 1993, in 1995, she sailed from Kherson to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where private sponsors wanted to have her repaired
8.
Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states
9.
USCGC Eagle (WIX-327)
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USCGC Eagle (WIX-327 is a 295-foot barque used as a training cutter for future officers of the United States Coast Guard. She is the only active commissioned sailing vessel in American military service and she is the seventh Coast Guard cutter to bear the name in a line dating back to 1792, including the Revenue Cutter Eagle, which famously fought the British man-of-war Dispatch during the War of 1812. Each summer, Eagle deploys with cadets from the United States Coast Guard Academy, the primary mission is training the cadets and officer candidates, but the ship also performs a public relations role for the Coast Guard and the United States. Often, Eagle makes calls at ports as a goodwill ambassador. The ship was built as the German sail training ship Horst Wessel in 1936, the vessel was given anti-aircraft armament and re-commissioned in 1942. At the end of the war, Horst Wessel was taken by the U. S. as war reparations, Eagle commenced its existence in Nazi Germany as Horst Wessel, a ship of the Gorch Fock class, constructed and designed by John Stanley. Horst Wessel was an improvement on the original design and she was larger in dimension and her spars were all steel, unlike Gorch Focks wooden yards. SSS Horst Wessel began life as Schiff 508 at Blohm & Voss in Hamburg and her keel was laid on 15 February, she was launched on 13 June, completed on 16 September, and commissioned on 17 September. She was the ship in the class to be built. Rudolf Hess gave the speech at her launch in the presence of Adolf Hitler, the name was given in tribute to SA leader Horst Wessel, who had been accorded martyr status by the Nazi Party. He also wrote the song came to be known as Horst-Wessel-Lied and used in the Nazi national anthem. Shortly after work began on Horst Wessel, the Blohm & Voss shipyard laid the keel of the German battleship Bismarck, SSS Horst Wessel served as the flagship of the Kriegsmarine sail training fleet, which consisted of Gorch Fock, Albert Leo Schlageter, and Horst Wessel. Horst Wessel was commanded by Captain August Thiele, a previous Captain of Gorch Fock, in the three years before World War II, she undertook numerous training cruises in the North Atlantic waters, sailing with trainee groups consisting of both future officers and future petty officers. On 21 August 1938, Adolf Hitler visited the ship and sailed for approximately one hour before departing, later that year, Horst Wessel and Albert Leo Schlageter undertook a four-month voyage to the Caribbean and visited St. Thomas and Venezuela. Along the way, they caught numerous sharks and turtles at sea, numerous weapons were installed throughout the decks, including two 20 mm anti-aircraft guns on the bridge wings, two on the foredeck, and two 20 mm Flakvierling quad mounts on the waist. From late 1942 through early 1945, she sailed on numerous training deployments in the Baltic sea with cadets fresh out of basic training, Horst Wessel took Albert Leo Schlageter in a stern tow to keep her from running aground until larger ships could arrive the next day to assist. In April 1945, after the last German cadet class had departed and she sailed to Flensburg where Captain Barthold Schnibbe surrendered to the British, and the ship ran up the Union Jack. Horst Wessel was ordered to Bremerhaven and tied to a temporary pier, at the end of World War II, the four German sailing vessels then extant were distributed to various nations as war reparations
10.
Gorch Fock (1958)
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The Gorch Fock is a tall ship of the German Navy. She is the ship of that name and a sister ship of the Gorch Fock built in 1933. Both ships are named in honour of the German writer Johann Kinau who wrote under the pseudonym Gorch Fock, the modern-day Gorch Fock was built in 1958 and has since then undertaken 146 cruises, including one tour around the world in 1988. She is sometimes referred to as the Gorch Fock II to distinguish her from her sister ship. The Gorch Fock is under the command of the Naval Academy in Flensburg-Mürwik, the new ship was a modernized repeat of the Albert Leo Schlageter, a slightly modified sister ship of the previous Gorch Fock. The 1933 Gorch Fock had already designed to be a very safe ship. The new ship was built by Blohm & Voss in Hamburg, launched on 23 August 1958, the Gorch Fock is a three-masted barque with a steel hull 81.2 m long and 12 m wide. She has a draught of some 5.2 m and a displacement at full load of 1760 tons, originally, she carried 1952 m² of canvas sails, later, she received slightly larger sails made of synthetic materials. The tops of her fore and main masts can be lowered so that she can navigate the Kiel Canal, over the years, various modernizations have been applied to the ship.7 knots under power. The interior has also been modified multiple times, technological advances made it possible to reduce the size of the galley, officially Gorch Fock is a Type 441 class naval ship with the NATO pennant number A60. Her international radio call sign is DRAX, the Gorch Fock was depicted on the 10 DM banknote of the third series issued by the Bundesbank and is therefore one of the most portrayed ships in the world. The Gorch Fock participates in sailing parades and Tall Ships Races, other ships of the same class include the USCGC Eagle, Sagres, Gorch Fock and Mircea. The Gorch Fock can host up to 350 passengers on board, the ships figurehead was designed by Heinrich Schroeteler, a former World War II U-boat commander. The figurehead has been replaced on several occasions, The first albatross from 1958 was lost after a few years, its replacement was made of wood, in 1969, the replacement was removed and replaced by a figurehead made of polyester to save weight. This albatross broke off when the Gorch Fock was being overhauled in 2000 and it was replaced by a new one made of wood. On 11 December 2002, the Gorch Fock figurehead was lost in a storm, the replacement was also made of wood. Again, the figurehead broke off in a storm on 5 December 2003, on 24 February 2004, the ship was fitted with a new albatross, this time made of carbon fibre reinforced polyester. The Gorch Fock has been in German Navy service as a ship since 1958
Romania
