In her original design - unfortunately she was the first of the five sisters to be scrapped more than a year ago - too bad, only four left of these handsome ships. In mid- and late 1980's they were all rebuilt to full style Cruise ships with hardly no Ro/Ro space at all. Originally from 1975 they worked as passenger and car ferries on the Odessa-Krym-Kavkaz-Georgia and Odessa-Alexandria, Odessa-Marseille and Odessa-Venezia lines. Those were the days... A rumour told that one of the ships should in 1983 be handed over to the new ScanSov Line of Baltic Shipping Company(Leningrad) for their new direct car ferry line Leningrad to Stockholm. Instead the chose the smaller former BORE I/SKANDIA(b. 1973) of Bore/EFFOA/Silja Line, to be the new ILICH - all mentioned ships built, by the way, by famous Wärtsilä in Turku - and all having highest North European ice class of those times.