“The passenger ship Neraida was built as Laurana in 1939 at the Cantieri Navali Del Quarnaro shipyards in what was then Italian Fiume, Croatia. It was used for coastal shipping in the Adriatic and as a rescue vessel during World War II. In 1949 it was bought by Yiannis Latsis and launched on the Argosaronic line, taking its Greek name and sailing to all the favorite destinations of the time. In 1974 the ship was retired. After it was decommissioned, it remained ashore for about 35 years, without being scrapped, as its owner considered it his lucky ship. In 2007, at the decision of his family, the Neraida was moved to the NCP shipyard in Sibenik, Croatia, to be converted into a floating museum under the supervision of Spyros Latsis. In 2010, the ship returned to Greece, now being a precious monument of the golden age of Greek shipping”. *
From a game of fate that began in a storm, the metal parts that were not used during its conversion into a museum of the historic ship Neraida (the metal parts that were not used during its conversion into a museum), stored for years in a container, were found in April 2012 in the hands of of Stelios Panagiotopoulos. Nuts, screws, exhausts and pistons, still covered with the aura of toil and the characteristic smell of rust, wet wood and salt, “sleeping but not dead”, turned into the living sculptures of an indelible memory.
* www.neraida.org
