Black Sea Shipping Company

The Black Sea Shipping Company was founded on the 13th of june 1922, under the name of Black Sea-Azov Sea Shipping as one of the Sovjet State fleets. Just after the second worldwar, the company was split into three parts, the first being the Black Sea Shipping Company, where this page is about, the second one being the Azov Sea Shipping Company and also the Georgian Shipping Company. The Azov Sea is just north of the Black Sea, just separated from eachother by a narrow strait and located in between the Crimian peninsula, the Kaukasus and the southeastern part of Ukraine. In 1964, also the tankerdivision of the Black Sea Shipping Company split from the main company under the name of Novorossiysk Shipping Company. Next to ships, the Black Sea Shipping Company was also the owner of all ports at the Ukrainian site of the Black Sea, except Sevastopol, Kerch, the ports at the Danube river and the ports at the Azov Sea. The ports were disconnected from the company after the collapse of the Sovjet Union. Next to services in the Black Sea, the company also had a line-service between the Mediterranean Sea and Montreal in Canada, even during the Cold War. 

Just in the beginning of the 1980's, the Black Sea Shipping Company was the largest shippingcompany in Europe and the second largest in the world. But the fall of the Sovjet Union in 1991 marked the beginning of the end for the Black Sea Shipping Company, as well as most other state-owned companies of the former Sovjet Union. The company passed into the ownership of the new Ukrainian state, but was declared bankrupt in 2009.

At this moment, there still are a lot of ships sailing that were once owned by the company. Next to the ships that are placed in the next pages, there are several ships that have also sailed under ownership of BLASCO and they have been placed elsewhere at Castles Of The Seas. Those are

Marco Polo

Maxim Gorkiy.

Astor 

Konstantin Simonov

Normally, I give the years in which the ships have sailed for this company, but mostly, for BLASCO these ships were chartered out to other companies. The years in which they really sailed for the Sovjet and later Ukrainian company is sometimes hard to trace back. In their individual histories can be read more about their BLASCO years.